Edward Alfred Pollard (February 27, 1832 – December 17, 1872) was an American author, journalist, and Confederate sympathizer during the American Civil War who wrote several books on the causes and events of the war, notably The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (1866) and The Lost Cause Regained (1868), wherein Pollard originated the long-standing pseudo-historical ideology of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.