Warren Lee Goss's ‘Recollections of a Private’ (1885) was published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, May to October 1885. The Century promoted the publication of Civil War memoirs in its ‘Battles and Leaders of the Civil War’ series, which ran from November 1884 to November 1887, massively increasing the magazine's subscription. Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel edited The Century's four-volume Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York: Century Company, 1887–88). Unsolicited memoirs of the war started appearing in 1885 under the title ‘Memoranda on the Civil War,’ brief pieces commenting on previous articles. An editorial comment on the series declared: ‘when completed it will probably constitute a more authoritative and final statement of the events of the war as seen through the eyes of commanders and participants than has before been made on a single plan’ (March 1885, p. 788).

Collected with other pieces as Recollections of a Private. A Story of the Army of the Potomac (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1890). Goss's accounts are cumulative, combining reports from different eyewitnesses. In his preface to the 1890 collection he explained:

Herein I have endeavored to speak for my many comrades in the ranks. […] The ‘Army of the Potomac’ was the people in arms. It mirrored the diversified opinions and occupations of a free and intelligent democracy. The force that called it together was the spirit that made a government of the people possible. Its ranks were largely filled with youth, who had no love for war, but who had left their pleasant homes, and the pursuits of peace, that the government they loved might not perish. To the large numbers of patriotic young men in the ranks is to be attributed much of its hopeful spirit. Thus it was that, though baffled by bloody and disheartening reverses, though it changed its commanders often, it never lost its discipline, its heroic spirit, or its confidence in final success. Its private soldiers were often as intelligent critics of military movements as were their superiors.

Goss published a number of works about young infantrymen, including The Soldier's Story of His Captivity at Andersonville, Belle Isle, and Other Rebel Prisons (1867).