Addendum

Concerning yesterday's post:

The Wikipedia page for Kantor showed up in a search for "civil wars best years of our lives."  (The actual goal of the search was "Is there a Civil War equivalent to that movie/story," although it did not yield anything like that.)

It turns out that, about ten years after writing the novel behind The Best Years of Our Lives, Kantor wrote  about Andersonville, the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. (Kantor was inspired in part by being at the liberation of Buchenwald.) The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956. While it's not quite a Civil War equivalent, it does appear to share the theme of ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances.