"The Swamp Fox, Francis Marion" by Noel Gerson

I am pretty sure that The Swamp Fox, Francis Marion was on my to-be-read shelves longer than any other book I currently own.  I believe I bought it back when we lived in Wisconsin.  We left Wisconsin in December of 2007.  That means I have packed up and moved this book three times.  

Well, I'm glad I hung onto it for nearly twenty years, rather than getting rid of it along the way, because I quite enjoyed this book!  Even though it was not quite what I was expecting.

I thought this book was going to be a non-fiction account of Francis Marion's guerrilla warfare against the British soldiers during the American Revolution.  Instead, it's written like fiction, and starts off in 1752, when Marion is a very young man!  It traces his on-again, off-again romance with the beautiful Esther Videau over several decades, while also showing how a young South Carolina plantation owner could become the kind of man who would basically invent guerilla warfare.

I did a scanty bit of research after finishing the book and found that a lot of what this book includes was true -- particularly that he really didn't get married until he was in his 50s, after the war had ended.  Since it's written in a fictionalized style, I didn't expect it to adhere strictly to facts, but it looks like the biggest thing they invented was saying that Marion only employed freedmen on his plantation.  In reality, he was a slaveowner like the vast majority of South Carolina plantation owners; this was published in 1967, during the tail end of the Civil Rights Era, so I'm guessing that may have played some part in that particular aspect.

Overall, this was a fun book, but I was disappointed that only a few chapters dealt with his Revolutionary War exploits, since I was expecting the whole book to be about that.  I'm glad I've finally read it, though!  And this marks my fourth book read for my #RevolutionaryWarReads challenge!

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for descriptions of warfare and death.  It's pretty tame and generalized.  There's a bit of mild cussing here and there, too.  No smut or overt gore.