Among Lee’s biographies, Douglas Southall Freeman’s R. E. Lee (Scribner’s, 1934-35, four vols.) is unsurpassed; a one-volume abridgement was published in 1961. The best of the rest is Clifford Dowdey’s Lee (Little, Brown, 1965). Special studies include Thomas L. Connelly’s The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (Knopf, 1977) and Paul C. Nagel’s The Lees of Virginia (Oxford, 1990). The general’s military thought is expressed in The Wartime Papers of R E. Lee (Little, Brown, 1961), edited by Clifford Dowdey.

— S.W.S.