He is best known for the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning short story collection Spit Baths (2006) and his histories of the United States Civil War.
Downs was born in San Francisco and raised in Elizabethtown and Hyden, Kentucky; Nashville; and Kapaa, Kauai, Hawaii.
A Publishers Weekly review of Spit Baths reads, "A strong sense of style and unfaltering command of his material allow Downs to take the kinds of risks in tone and subject that make his debut a love-it-or-hate-it proposition".
[9] Martha Woodall of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that Spit Baths was a "rich and mesmerizing collection of short fiction".
[18] Downs' book Declarations of Dependence: Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908 was published by Harvard University Press in 2015.
Unfortunately, he lacks the human touch and eye for color that could bring alive the visceral dimension of the terrorist violence wrought upon the freed blacks".