Night Watch

Jayne Anne Phillips was born and raised in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She studied at West Virginia University before receiving an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She published her first book a chapbook called Sweethearts, in 1976. Her third book, a short story collection titled Black Tickets (1979), brought her widespread acclaim, earning accolades from writers including Tillie Olsen and Raymond Carver. That book also won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. Since then, Phillips has published six novels and three short story collections. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Night Watch won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Phillips considers Night Watch to be the third novel in a trilogy that began with her first novel, Machine Dreams, and continued with her novel Lark and Termite. That thematic trilogy explores the impacts of war in three different conflicts—the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and the U.S. Civil War.

Night Watch explores the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. Through flashbacks, the novel documents one real-life battle in particular, the Battle of the Wilderness. The Battle of the Wilderness took place from May 5–May 7, 1864, and was fought between the Union Army (commanded by Ulysses S. Grant) and the Army of Northern Virginia (commanded by Robert E. Lee). Union forces suffered an estimated 17,500 casualties in two days, but Grant refused to order a retreat because he had ensured President Lincoln that the Union Army wouldn’t halt its advance to the Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia. In the novel, Ephraim is wounded during that battle and loses his memory as a result. Much of Night Watch also takes place at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, an actual institution that operated from 1864 until 1994. Though Dr. Story is a fictional character, his uncle in the novel, Thomas Story Kirkbride, is a historical figure. Dr. Kirkbride was a physician who is considered one of the founders of psychiatry in the U.S. As portrayed in the novel, Dr. Kirkbride was a lifelong Quaker and called for the use of “moral treatment,” an approach that advocated treating people with mental illness with compassion and respect.

Phillips has said that Night Watch is the third book in a thematic trilogy that examines the impacts of war. The first two books in that trilogy are Machine Dreams and Lark and Termite, which examine the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Korean War, respectively. Phillips’s writing style in Night Watch has been compared to that of William Faulkner. Like Phillips, Faulkner used narrative techniques like various perspectives and stream of consciousness in his novels, including in The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom. Like Night Watch, Faulkner’s novels also address the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. Night Watch also takes place in roughly the same time period (before the Civil War to 1873) and touches on similar themes as Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Phillips has also cited several nonfiction books that she consulted when doing research for Night Watch, including Thomas Story Kirkbride’s On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane and the Library of America’s four-volume collection The Civil War Told by Those Who Lived It.