The story of the fall and destruction of this Confederate city placed Atlanta in the legendary realm of Atlantis, Troy, Athens, and Moscow. Requiem for a Lost City shows us the reality of Civil War Atlanta from the eve of Secession to the memorials for the fallen, many years after the war, through the memories of a participant. Sallie Clayton would have been the same age as the fictional Scarlett O'Hara during the Civil War. Her memoirs, however, are not a work of fiction but bittersweet reminiscences of growing up in a doomed city in the midst of losing a war for a society's survival. Although Sallie's memoirs provide invaluable detail on Civil War Atlanta, she also wrote of her personal experiences on a plantation in Montgomery, in the midst of the opening shots of the battle for Chattanooga, and in the postwar riots of Augusta and Athens.
Sallie Clayton belonged to one of Georgia's wealthiest and most prominent families. Her memoirs are colored by the losses her family suffered. The introduction to this work includes background on the Claytons, Sallie's writings, and Civil War Atlanta that provides a more balanced and fuller account of life at "the crossroads of the Confederacy". The introduction also attempts to give a more accurate view of Civil War Atlanta than that in the popular mind.