The following works are important in the study of military history.
The following works are important in the study of military history. They are selected for their value in representing the conflict and/or the period in question, and they are arranged in roughly chronological subsections, within which they are arranged alphabetically by title.
Author: Xenophon
First published: 386-377
Anabasis chronicles the determined survival of an army of ten thousand Greek mercenaries stranded in northern Mesopotamia by the death of the claimant to the Persian throne who hired them. Although the author’s account of the mercenaries’ endurance against enormous military odds and great geographical obstacles is clearly colored by self-interest, the narrative is so stirring that it is said to have provided the literary inspiration for Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great’s shared conviction that they could conquer the Persian Empire with a relatively small but highly disciplined Greek army.
Author: Sunzi (Sun Tzu)
First published: c. 510
This treatise on waging war consists of thirty-six stratagems covering everything from geopolitical strategy to battlefield tactics to the practice of espionage. In all of these areas, Sunzi advises caution over bellicosity. He argues for short wars with broad support among the population and warns against the corrosive effects of protracted conflicts. He argues for the clever manipulation of all possible advantages in everything from topography to weaponry, for the mitigation of the limitations of one’s own forces, and for the concentration of force where the enemy is most vulnerable. That many of these ideas have become truisms is a testament to Sunzi’s lasting influence.
Author: Julius Caesar
First published: 52-51
This classic work of military commentary and Latin prose consists of seven books, with each book covering one year of Caesar’s seven-year campaign to subdue Gaul. Written in the third person, the narrative focuses not only on the major battles but also on the logistical preparation, intelligence gathering, political maneuvering, and tactical ingenuity that enabled Caesar’s always greatly outnumbered forces to defeat the Celtic tribes. For all of their ferocity, however, the Gallic tribes had been decimated by long, ongoing conflicts with Germanic tribes, and they remained unable to overcome their tribal divisions for any extended period.
Author: Herodotus
First published: c. 424
Known as the “Father of History,” Herodotus originally published his History in nine volumes. His primary subject was the
Author: Thucydides
First published: 431-404
Establishing many of the fundamental elements of modern historiography, Thucydides attempted to provide an objective history of the
Author: Homer
First published: c. 750
The oldest surviving work in the Western literary canon, this epic poem describes the extended
Author: Vyasa
First published: c. 400
One of the two great epics in Sanskrit that define much of the cultural and religious traditions of Hinduism, the Mahabharata includes more than 100,000 verse lines and 1.8 million words. On a basic narrative level, this epic poem is a chronicle of the struggle for royal succession in the Kuru kingdom of Hastinapura, a struggle that reached its great climax in the Kurukshetra War. The contending claimants to the throne are the Kaurava and the Pandava branches of the royal bloodline. Despite incredible demonstrations of valor by the great warriors on both sides during the war, the Pandava are ultimately victorious. Commentators have often drawn parallels between this Sanskrit epic and the Iliad.
Author: Colleen McCullough
First published: 1990-2007
Best known for The Thorn Birds (1977), the melodramatic family saga about the development of Australia, McCullough followed its tremendous commercial success, including its adaptation as an extremely popular television miniseries, with a complete change of direction. In the seven novels of her painstakingly researched series Masters of Rome, McCullough chronicles the fall of the Roman Republic and its transformation into an imperial state. The seven novels include The First Man in Rome (1990), The Grass Crown (1991), Fortune’s Favorites (1993), Caesar’s Women (1996), Caesar: Let the Dice Fly (1997), The October Horse (2002), and Antony and Cleopatra (2007).
Author: Marguerite Yourcenar
First published: 1951, as Mémoires d’Hadrien
Working from the fact that the Roman emperor Hadrian wrote an autobiography that was lost to history, Yourcenar provides a fictional version of that autobiography in this, her most acclaimed novel. Epistolary in form, the novel is framed as a letter from Hadrian to his presumptive successor, Marcus Aurelius. After years of immersing herself in Roman history and culture, Yourcenar was able to create and sustain a voice for Hadrian that won over classicists as well as more general readers, re-creating the milieu that he shaped at a level far beyond the usual “costume novel.”
Author: Howard Fast
First published: 1951
Fast transformed the leader of the largest slave revolt in Roman history into a champion of egalitarian, progressive ideals. The novel is divided into two types of sections. Those told in the past tense present the recollections of Roman leaders of the failed attempts to quell the uprising and the terror it created throughout Italy. These accounts exhibit the political machinations and the class consciousness that eventually subverted the core values of the Roman Republic and led to the rise of the imperial state. The other sections are told in the present tense from the rebels’ very different perspective. In contrast to the Roman vilification of Spartacus as a barbarous agent of civil disorder, to his followers he is an iconic figure, the embodiment of valor and honorableness.
Author: Conn Iggulden
First published: 2007-2008
Called the Conqueror series in the United Kingdom, this series includes Birth of an Empire (2007), Lords of the Bow (2008), and Bones of the Hills (2008). It reconstructs the rise of Genghis Khan from the leadership of a small nomadic tribe to the master of the largest empire in human history. The series is notable both for the extensiveness of Iggulden’s research and for his unobtrusive integration of that research into the narratives. Projecting this as a seven-volume series, Iggulden has indicated that he will focus on Kublai Khan in the fourth through sixth novels.
Author: Sir Walter Scott
First published: 1819
The
Author: Unknown
First published: c. 1140, as Cantar del mío Cid
The hero of this great epic poem is based on
Author: Luo Guanzhong
First published: mid-fourteenth century, as Sanguo zhi yanyi
This epic novel treats the political turmoil and the military campaigns that followed the
Author: Frank Yerby
First published: 1952
Although
Author: Kakuichi
First published: 1371, as Heike monogatari
This
Author: Gary Jennings
First published: 1980
Jennings’s novel is the first in a five-novel series, which also includes Aztec Autumn (1998), Aztec Blood (2002), Aztec Rage (2006), and Aztec Fire (2008). The series chronicles the history of
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
First published: 1826
The Last of the Mohicans is one of Cooper’s most enduring novels and one of the best-known novels about the French and Indian War. The novel emphasizes that most of the war was fought on the frontier, by colonial and Native American surrogates rather than by the French and British forces per se. In the wilderness setting, treachery and savagery reduced adherence to the “rules” of European warfare to a tragic sort of foolhardiness. In the novel’s focal event, the British garrison at Fort William Henry surrenders, and the French allow the British safe passage out of the wilderness. The Huron allies of the French nonetheless ambush the British column and massacre almost everyone in it.
Author: Walter D. Edmonds
First published: 1936
One of the best-known novels about the American Revolution (1775-1783), Drums Along the Mohawk is set in the Mohawk River Valley of upstate New York, at that time the frontier between colonial settlements and the territory of the Iroquois. Allied with the British and the Tory colonists who remained loyal to the British crown, the Iroquois terrorized the colonial settlers. Moreover, when the settlers banded together to present an effective fighting force, they had to leave their homes, their crops and animals, and sometimes their wives and children defenseless.
Author: C. S. Forester
First published: 1937-1967
Chronologically, this is the second novel in the eleven-novel series following Horatio Hornblower’s experiences as a British naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars. Published in 1952, Lieutenant Hornblower was the seventh novel of the series in order of publication but seems to have been the pivotal novel in terms of securing the popularity of the series on both sides of the Atlantic. Chronologically, the other novels in the series include Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950), Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962), Hornblower and the Crisis (1967), Hornblower and the Atropos (1953), Beat to Quarters (1937; also known as The Happy Return), Ship of the Line (1938), Flying Colours (1938), Commodore Hornblower (1945), Lord Hornblower (1946), and Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (1958).
Author: Patrick O’Brian
First published: 1969
This is the first in a series of twenty novels featuring Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin, serving together with the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Considerably different from the film adaptation in 2003, the novel follows the career of the warship Sophie from helping to protect a convoy of British supply ships to preying on French merchant ships to a vicious battle with a Spanish warship to its dramatic capture by a squadron of French warships. The novel establishes three hallmarks of the series: O’Brian’s great interest in the intricacies of naval politics, in the physical workings of ships of the period and the ways in which their crews functioned, and in the individual personalities of his characters.
Author: Bernard Cornwell
First published: 1981-2006
Set during the Napoleonic period, Cornwell’s series follows the title character across several continents and a broad range of adventures and misadventures. Sharpe is introduced as a private serving with the British East India Company in India, serves in the extended campaigns against the French in Portugal and Spain, participates as a field-promoted officer in the Battle of Waterloo, and visits St. Helena and meets Napoleon on his way to Chile on a privately commissioned mission. The series was not initially published in chronological order. It eventually included twenty-one numbered novels and three numbered short stories, from Sharpe’s Tiger to Sharpe’s Devil.
Author: Leo Tolstoy
First published: 1865-1869, as Voyna i mir
The greatest war novel ever written, War and Peace treats Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, which to that point was the greatest military undertaking and the greatest military debacle in human history. Told from the Russian point of view, with much attention to the class structure of Russian society, this twelve-hundred-page novel is equal to Napoleon’s grand ambition and the size of his Grande Armée to the vastness of the Russian landscape and of the desolation left by the retreating Russian’s “burned earth” policy and the great scope of the Russian effort, materially and morally, to drive the Antichrist from the motherland. Every ambitious war novel written since War and Peace has inevitably been compared to it and has been found wanting.
Author: Douglas C. Jones
First published: 1976
The first novel by Jones, and the first novel in the trilogy that includes Arrest Sitting Bull (1977) and A Creek Called Wounded Knee (1978), The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer received the
Author: James Alexander Thom
First published: 1989
Thom has made a career out of writing historical novels about the opening of the American frontier in the first half of the nineteenth century. His most commercially and critically successful novel, The Panther in the Sky is a fictionalized biography of
Author: Nikolai Gogol
First published: 1835, revised 1842
In this short novel, Gogol chronicles the military campaigns waged by the title character against the Poles, who are determined to dominate the Ukraine. A moving tale of determined armed resistance, a deeply ingrained spirit of independence, and a nascent sense of national spirit, the novel presents the Cossacks as archetypal Russians, with Taras and his sons playing out the sort of conflicts that often occur between great men and the sons who tragically attempt to emulate them or bitterly reject them. Thus, for all of its considerable historically accurate detail, the novel provides an idealized, if not distorted, view of the Cossacks before they became an instrument of Russian imperialism and oppression.
Author: Henryk Sienkiewicz
First published: 1884-1888
Although Sienkiewicz received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905, he is remembered today primarily as the author of the international best seller
Author: Rudyard Kipling
First published: 1892
The best known of Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads, “Gunga Din” focuses on the hard existence and unexpected nobility of an Indian water carrier for the British forces on the Afghan frontier. The poem exploits the fact that the title character is regarded as an inferior by most soldiers in the army that he serves and that, when he is noticed, it is generally as the target of indignities. The narrator of the poem, however, recounts how this unlikely figure heroically gave his life to save the lives of the narrator and many of his fellow soldiers.
Author: J. G. Farrell
First published: 1973
Set during the Indian Mutiny or
Author: Alfred, Lord Tennyson
First published: 1855
As part of his duties as the British poet laureate, Tennyson produced poems on events of national interest. This poem celebrates the heroism of British cavalry that charged down a valley into Russian artillery fire during the
Author: Stephen Wright
First published: 2006
In what may be the first truly postmodern novel to treat the American Civil War, Wright focuses on the misadventures of Liberty Fish, an abolitionist who, as soon as he is old enough, predictably enlists in the Union army. What makes Liberty’s situation rich with ironic possibilities is the fact that, although his parents are staunch abolitionists, his maternal grandparents are unapologetic slave owners, and his paternal grandparents are textile manufacturers who owe their fortune to slave-produced cotton from the Southern plantations. Wright stresses that despite the unprecedented scale and complexity of this terrible conflict, it both created and was created out of complicated, multilayered antagonisms that divided individual families and the tangled internal conflicts with which its combatants struggled even as they raised arms against each other.
Author: MacKinlay Kantor
First published: 1955
For this historical novel about the horrors endured by Union
Author: Charles Frazier
First published: 1997
Set in the closing months of the American Civil War, this debut novel by Charles Frazier juxtaposes the stories of W. P. Inman, a wounded Confederate veteran who decides to desert, and his love interest, Ada Monroe, who has moved from Charleston to the supposed safety of the mountains of North Carolina. As Inman travels the 250 miles to Cold Mountain and Ada, he confronts all sorts of scurrilous characters and is hounded by the Home Guard. Meanwhile, Ada has to cope with her father’s death and survives largely because of her growing friendship with a mountain woman named Ruby Thewes. The lovers reunite but only long enough for her to become pregnant with his child.
Author: Michael Shaara
First published: 1974
In this sprawling novel, Shaara attempted to describe the
Author: E. L. Doctorow
First published: 2005
In his previous novels, Doctorow has experimented with the conventions of the historical novel and has brought a postmodern sensibility to his treatment of historical subjects and to his fictional reconstruction of historical eras. In this novel, which depicts
Author: Stephen Crane
First published: 1895
The best-known and most critically acclaimed novel about the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage was a largely imaginative work, inspired by Crane’s fascination with photographs of the battlefields and his dissatisfaction with the generally dry reminiscences of veterans. The short novel focuses on a young soldier named Henry Fleming. In his second battle, he breaks from the Union lines as the Confederates attack. Finding himself among either other deserters or the wounded, he is embarrassed by his lack of a wound. However, an argument with an artillery man leaves him with a gash in the head, and when he returns to his unit, his injury is accepted as a battle wound. In the next day’s battle, Fleming becomes almost recklessly courageous, inspiring his fellow soldiers and impressing their officers.
Author: Elmore Leonard
First published: 1998
Leonard’s novel was published on the hundredth anniversary of the event that made the Spanish-American War inevitable, the explosion on the battleship
Author: Giles Foden
First published: 1999
In this, one of the most significant novels about the
Author: Boris Pasternak
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First published: 1957
Pasternak’s epic novel treats the Russian Revolution and the Civil War between the Red and White forces that followed it. In the half decade between 1917 and 1922, imperial Russia was wrecked and the Bolsheviks created the Soviet Union at the cost of several million of lives. Most of the dead not were combatants but civilians unable to escape the carnage or unable to survive on the devastated landscape that was its aftermath. Pasternak’s protagonist, a physician and a poet, represents those who somehow managed to survive but at a considerable physical and psychological cost.
Author: Mariano Azuela
First published: 1916, as Los de abajo
Written while Azuela served as a surgeon with Pancho Villa’s forces in northern Mexico in the mid-1910’s, this novel is not only the most significant work about the decade-long Mexican Revolution but also one of the most influential works of social protest in Mexican and Latin American literature. Azuela conveys the massive dislocations of the population caused by the almost continuously shifting alliances that made each successive leader’s hold on power very tenuous. Likewise, he captures the extraordinary brutality of the conflict, which was fueled as much by feverishly confused ideologies as by ideological fervor.
Author: Erich Maria Remarque
First published: 1929
One of the most highly regarded novels to come out of World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front is also one of the few German novels about that war to have been made widely available in translation. It focuses on a group of school friends who are encouraged to enlist for idealistic reasons that quickly seem bitterly delusory amid the carnage of trench warfare. When the soldiers return to their homes on leave, they realize that in going off to save their homeland, they have lost all connection to home.
Author: Sebastian Faulks
First published: 1993
This novel is the middle volume of Faulks’s French Trilogy, which also includes The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1989) and Charlotte Gray (1998). The most commercially successful and critically acclaimed novel of the trilogy, Birdsong has, moreover, been one of the most popular and most highly regarded British novels of the last quarter century. The main character is Stephen Wraysford, and the primary focus is on his experiences during World War I, especially during the great British offensive along the Somme. A parallel narrative concerns the efforts of his granddaughter, Elizabeth, to learn about his wartime experiences more than a half century later.
Author: Jack D. Hunter
First published: 1964
Hunter’s first novel charts the rise and fall of Bruno Stachel, a German fighter pilot during World War I. Unlike most of the original fighter pilots, who were aristocrats, Stachel comes from a working-class background and begins his wartime service as an infantryman. When the air losses create a demand for pilots, he not only seizes the opportunity to escape the carnage of the trenches but also becomes determined to compile the twenty “kills” required to win the Blue Max, an award reserved for Germany’s most highly honored air aces. Stachel’s ruthless pursuit of his goal involves him in all sorts of machinations–military, political, socioeconomic, and sexual.
Author: Arold Zweig
First published: 1927, as Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa
Part of the six-volume series The Great War of White Men, this satiric novel follows the title character, a Russian soldier being held in a German
Author: Romain Rolland
First published: 1920, as Clérambault: Histoire d’une conscience libre pendant la guerre
Most remembered for his ten-novel cycle Jean Christophe (1904-1912), Rolland received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915. Five years later, this novel presented a powerful indictment of all wars. The major character struggles to come to terms with his son’s death in combat during World War I. Throughout the novel, father and son are out of step. Initially, the father is skeptical about the causes and ramifications of the war, while his son is stirred deeply by a sense of the momentousness of the war. Then as the son experiences the horror of the trenches and becomes profoundly disenchanted, the father finds himself searching for ways to express his heightened patriotism. In the end, the main character embraces pacifism and is accused of being traitorous.
Author: Rupert Brooke
First published: 1915
One of the best-known British poets of World War I, Brooke was twenty-seven when he died of blood poisoning on his way to the battlefield at Gallipoli. He had experienced relatively little of the horrors of the trench warfare that would transform much of northern France into a muddy, carnage-strewn wasteland. Shortly before he died, Brooke wrote a series of patriotic sonnets that captured the intense patriotism and naïveté of prewar Britain. The most remembered of these sonnets are “Peace,” “Safety,” “The Dead,” and “The Soldier,” considered by most to be Brooke’s signature poem.
Author: Wilfred Owen
First published: 1963, edited by C. Day Lewis
Owen served on the western front in 1916 and 1917, participating in the Battle of the Somme. While recuperating from shell shock, Owen met Siegfried Sassoon, who influenced Owen’s composition of a series of poems in which he sought to describe his own wartime experience and to emphasize the “pity” underlying all battlefield experience. Only a few of these poems were published before Owen returned to the front, where he perished one week before the Armistice. His best-known poems include “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” “Dulce et Decorum Est,” and the never completed “Strange Meeting.”
Author: E. E. Cummings
First published: 1922
In this autobiographical novel, Cummings re-creates his four-month
Author: Ernest Hemingway
First published: 1929
Hemingway’s novel is set in northeastern Italy, in the region surrounding the Isonzo River, where a series of great battles were fought between the Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces during World War I. The main character is Frederic Henry, an American serving as a volunteer with the Italian ambulance corps. While he is recuperating from wounds, he falls in love with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley. Eventually he returns to the front lines, but the anarchic brutality that follows an Italian retreat from the Isonzo convinces him to flee to neutral Switzerland with Catherine, who is pregnant with their child. The child is stillborn, and Catherine dies in childbirth.
Author: Jaroslav Hašek
First published: 1921-1923, as Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světove války
When the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek died of tuberculosis in 1923, he had completed only four of the projected six books about Švejk (often rendered as Schweik). The four completed books have subsequently been published for the most part as a single book. The tone of the work is clearly satiric, with Schweik repeatedly demonstrating the ridiculousness of the Austro-Hungarian military, its other institutions, and the continued viability of the empire itself. Hašek is able to sustain the satire because Schweik remains an ambiguous figure; that is, one is never sure whether he is a clever malcontent or is simply an imbecile who accidentally or coincidentally makes those around him seem ridiculous.
Author: John McCrae
First published: 1915
The best-known poem about World War I, “In Flanders Fields” was written by a Canadian physician, John McCrae, who was serving as a battlefield surgeon with the British forces in Belgium. Following the very costly
Author: Ford Madox Ford
First published: 1924-1928
Ford may be most remembered for The Good Soldier (1915), which remains one of the most cited illustrations of the use of an unreliable narrator, but this tetralogy of novels about a British officer’s experiences in the trenches during World War I is arguably his masterwork. The main character is Christopher Tietjens, the scion of prominent family of Tory gentry, and the novels trace his deepening preoccupation with sustaining both his commitment to the war and his determination to conduct himself honorably. The four novels of the tetralogy include
Author: Humphrey Cobb
First published: 1935
Published in the mid-1930’s when another world war seemed to be increasingly inevitable, Paths of Glory offered a scathing indictment of military culture and command structure. Set in World War I, the story hinges on a French general’s first ordering an impossible attack against a German position and then ordering the execution of forty arbitrarily selected French soldiers as a punishment for the “cowardice” evident in the failure to achieve the attack’s objective. In Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, Colonel Dax, the commander of the units that spearheaded the attack, provides an uncompromisingly moral perspective, but in Cobb’s novel, he is more ineffectual, mitigating only by degrees what is unambiguously morally outrageous.
Author: Pat Barker
First published: 1991-1995
Barker’s highly regarded trilogy includes
Author: Mark Helprin
First published: 1991
The title character, now an elderly man on his way to visit his daughter, impulsively joins a much younger man on a seventy-kilometer walk to their destinations. Along the way, the title character reminisces about his life and, in particular, recounts his experiences during World War I. Having enlisted in the navy to avoid the carnage of the ground war, he was assigned to a riverboat patrolling first near the Austrian front to monitor enemy movements and then in Sicily to apprehend deserters. He himself eventually becomes a deserter, barely escapes execution, serves with the infantry, is wounded, falls in love with a nurse who is killed in an air attack on her hospital, and ends up after the war in Vienna, tracking down the pilot responsible for her death.
Author: John Dos Passos
First published: 1921
One of the most significant American novels about World War I, Three Soldiers is, in contrast to the modernist experimentation with form and language in Manhattan Transfer (1925) and The U.S.A. Trilogy (1937), a work set squarely in the realist tradition. The three soldiers of the title are Andrews from Virginia, Chrisfield from Indiana, and Fuselli from California. The novel describes the ways in which the soldiers’ training and the authoritarian regimen of military life combine to reduce their sense of individuality and of the significance of their individual fates. Despite their very different temperaments and ambitions, all three soldiers are left irreparably brutalized by their experiences in uniform.
Author: Henri Barbusse
First published: 1916, as Le Feu
Written while Barbusse was still serving in the trenches with the French army during World War I, Under Fire imitates the form and style of a journal, and its narrator moves anecdotally from one day’s experiences to the next. The narrator is a member of a squad of French “volunteers” who responded patriotically to the German invasion and try to maintain their sense of purpose in the midst of a conflict that has acquired a scope terribly beyond any cause. The novel is notable for its unsparingly realistic descriptions of the hardships of life in the trenches and the carnage of trench warfare.
Author: Timothy Findley
First published: 1977
The recipient of the Governor-General’s Award for fiction, Findley’s novel stands as one of the major Canadian works about World War I, even though it was published just short of six decades after the Armistice. Like Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1971), The Wars is framed as a historian’s reconstruction of past events–in this case, the mysteries surrounding the last days in the life of a young officer named Robert Ross. Stationed on the western front, Ross is increasingly traumatized by the cumulative effect of his wartime experiences. Following his gang rape by a group of soldiers, he “madly” sets free a corral of horses and shoots dead the officer who tries to stop him. He and the horses are eventually caught in a barn, and when it is set on fire, Ross suffers terrible burns, from which he ultimately dies.
Author: Richard McKenna
First published: 1962
After serving in the U.S. Navy for more than twenty years, McKenna began to write fiction, producing primarily novels and short stories in the science-fiction genre. This novel is one of the few works in which he drew directly on his own military experience, and he died before the novel was adapted for a very successful film starring Steve McQueen. The title of the novel is a colloquial rendering of the name of the river gunboat on which the main character is serving, the USS San Pablo. While patrolling the Yangtze River in the late 1920’s, the gunboat becomes enmeshed in the rising tensions and increasingly open conflict between the Chinese nationalists and communists.
Author: Ernest Hemingway
First published: 1940
The best-known novel about the Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s, For Whom the Bell Tolls is set among the partisans fighting behind the Fascist lines on behalf of the Republican cause. The main character is Robert Jordan, a munitions expert with the International Brigade, who is sent to join a group of partisans who are to provide support in his demolition of a bridge. The Republican forces are set to launch an offensive, and destroying the bridge will prevent the Fascists from rushing reinforcements to the sector against which the offensive is being launched. The novel emphasizes the psychological strain that this merciless conflict exerted on combatants and civilians alike.
Author: George Orwell
First published: 1938
In this memoir of his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, Orwell focuses as much on the divisions on the Republican side as on the battles fought between the Republican and Fascist forces. A communist who was opposed to Stalinism, Orwell joined the POUM militia on the Republican side, but in less than a year after his arrival in Spain, the Republican leadership had outlawed POUM because the Republican cause had become increasingly dependent on Soviet aid and dominated by Soviet “political advisers.” After barely escaping a Stalinist “purge” of anti-Stalinist elements on the Republican side, Orwell became a lifelong critic of totalitarian communism.
Author: J. G. Ballard
First published: 1984
The protagonist of this autobiographical novel is Jim Graham, a British boy who is living with his parents in Shanghai when the Japanese overwhelm the city. Separated from his parents, Jim is eventually picked up by the Japanese and sent to a civilian detention center. The novel chronicles the ways in which he learns to survive by his wits and sometimes manages to survive by sheer luck. Despite his awareness of the brutality of his Japanese captors, the boy inevitably admires their proud bearing and martial discipline. The novel vividly depicts the deprivation of the war’s final months and the uncertainty of its closing weeks.
Author: Martin Booth
First published: 1997
Like J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Booth’s novel treats the Sino-Japanese War that merged into the broader war in Asia and the Pacific between the Allies and the Japanese. Also, like Ballard, Booth has chosen to depict these events through the perspective of an English boy separated from his parents by the Japanese attack against the city in which they are living, in this case Hong Kong. Unlike Ballard’s protagonist, however, Nicholas Holford ends not in a detention camp but adopted by a Chinese family, and he becomes increasingly involved in sabotage and other clandestine activities of Chinese Communist partisans.
Author: Yan Mo
First published: 1992
Set in rural China during the period of the Japanese invasion and occupation, Red Sorghum was originally published as a series of four short novels. The sorghum crop is at the center of the novel, literally as well as symbolically, for the survival of the Chinese village depends on it, but the fields in which it is planted are the scene of both a Japanese massacre and a nearly suicidal but successful retributive attack by the peasants and partisans. Yan’s narrative style is modernist in its experimentation with chronology and point of view, but his style owes much to Magical Realism. The color red is omnipresent, from the sorghum itself to the flamboyantly vivid descriptions of the mutilating effects of violence.
Author: Leon Uris
First published: 1964
In this, his fifth, novel, Uris provides a contemporary history of the city that a quarter century earlier had become the monument-dominated capital of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The grandiose plans of Hitler and his architects had just begun to be realized, however, when the city became a favorite target of the Allied air war against Germany. Then, although largely reduced to ruins, it became the setting for the war’s climactic and bloodiest battle. Following that apocalyptic framing of Hitler’s suicide, it then was rebuilt, but as an occupied and militarily divided city that became a symbolic as well as actual focal point of Cold War tensions.
Author: Leon Uris
First published: 1953
Based on Uris’s own combat experience as a Marine, this novel focuses on a communications company of the Sixth Marine Regiment, following its members from boot camp through some of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific campaigns in World War II–Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Saipan. The novel is narrated by the company’s battle-hardened sergeant, and it follows the pattern of many GI novels in emphasizing the ethnic diversity among the men in the company, which includes a farm boy from Indiana, a Native American, and a Chicano.
Author: Uzodinma Iweala
First published: 2005
Relatively young boys have sometimes been enlisted into armies desperate for manpower (such as the German Home Guard in the closing months of World War II), but the forced recruitment of very young boys, even preadolescents, as a deliberate strategy for creating an easily indoctrinated fighting force is a relatively recent phenomenon seen primarily among insurgents in a number of African and several Asian nations. Iweala’s novel is set in a West African nation. It is narrated by a boy soldier who loses his childhood and almost loses all sense of himself amid the commonplace horrors of a war as ill-defined as his terror-sustained allegiance to his commander.
Author: John Hersey
First published: 1944
That Hersey’s novel, published in wartime, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, as World War II was drawing to a close, suggests the sort of appeal that it initially had. The novel is set in Italy after the Americans and British have driven the German forces back to the Italian mainland. The main character, an Italian American officer, becomes committed to replacing the bell in a village church that had been confiscated by the Fascists to be melted down and recycled into munitions. Although still admired for its craftsmanship, the novel has been increasingly regarded as the sort of approbative tale that is, in effect, a type of relatively benign
Author: Masuji Ibuse
First published: 1966, as Kuroi ame
In Japan, Ibuse remains an important literary figure of his generation, though he has not achieved the stature, through translation into English and other Western languages, of some of his contemporaries. Drawing on the diaries of survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Ibuse created a masterpiece of documentary realism in Black Rain. The central characters are an elderly man and his niece, whose determined attempts to reconstruct their lives from the absolute devastation of the bombing are shadowed by the specter of the long-term effects of the “black rain,” or radioactive fallout from the atomic blast.
Author: Len Deighton
First published: 1970
Although Deighton may be best known for his series of Cold War espionage novels featuring Bernard Samson, he is also the author of several novels and nonfiction books about World War II. Indeed, according to several critics, Bomber may be his most accomplished novel. It focuses on a single Royal Air Force bombing raid against the German industrial plants in the Ruhr Valley. The chapters follow the progress of the raid from hour to hour, and the suspense is heightened by the crews’ increasing awareness that the raid is not going as planned.
Author: Pierre Boulle
First published: 1952, as Pont de la rivière Kwai
Although Boulle’s novel won the Prix Sainte Beuve and was adapted for an acclaimed film, it has continued to generate controversy. The novel deals with the hurried construction of a railroad between Bangkok, Thailand, and Rangoon, Burma, to support the Japanese conquest of Burma during World War II. The massive project was completed with almost no heavy machinery. Instead, the Japanese relied on native conscripts and Allied
Author: W. E. B. Griffin
First published: 1983-2001
Griffin is the pseudonym of William Edmund Butterworth III, who has written more than a half dozen popular series of novels, most of which focus on the military. This series of nine novels follows a group of American Army officers who initially served as lieutenants during World War II and remained in the military through the immediate post-Vietnam era. The series is notable because its primary emphasis is not on the combat experiences of these officers, though that certainly is described, but, instead, on the tactics and strategies required to work changes through the military and political bureaucracies.
Author: Herman Wouk
First published: 1951
This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has also been commercially successful and critically acclaimed in its adaptations to stage and screen. The Caine is an outdated destroyer refitted to serve as a minesweeper. The story centers on a mutiny that occurs while the ship is under the command of Captain Queeg, a petty tyrant, who uses the service manual to intimidate and humiliate his subordinates. Much worse, he seemingly exhibits cowardice under fire and, at the time of the mutiny, during severe weather. The genius of Wouk’s story is that he shows that the mutineers have their own character flaws and self-serving motives.
Author: William Eastlake
First published: 1965
Just before the Battle of the Bulge, a loosely organized group of American soldiers are taken out of the front lines and billeted at a Belgian estate for much-needed rest and recuperation. Initially the owners of the estate welcome the soldiers as protectors, but when the German offensive in the Ardennes begins and the American commanding officer decides to turn the estate into a fortified position, the owners recognize that he is putting at great risk not just the lives of his soldiers and their own lives but also the estate and all of the irreplaceable artwork and family heirlooms that their mansion contains. The novel also explores the tension in each soldier between conditioned discipline and unit cohesion, and self-assertion and self-preservation.
Author: Joseph Heller
First published: 1961
This
Author: Neal Stephenson
First published: 1999
This massive novel (918 pages in hardcover) presents two parallel stories. The first follows the efforts of the British cryptographers based at Bletchley Park who eventually cracked the complex codes produced by the Nazi Enigma machine. That extremely complex device was used to communicate with the U-boat fleet that was devastating the British merchant fleet, the United Kingdom’s main source of military supplies and foodstuffs. The second story is set in the near future and concerns an effort to use computer-driven cryptography to create an impenetrable data center in a nation called Kinakuta, which resembles the East Indian Kingdom of Brunei.
Author: Randall Jarrell
First published: 1945
Given the great scope and length of many of the most acclaimed American novels about World War II, it is ironic that this, one of the best-known American poems about the war, is only five lines long. The ball-turret gunner operated a machine gun that swiveled 360 degrees within a plexiglass hemisphere attached to the bottom of the B-27 bombers that were the mainstay of the American forces in the costly air war against Germany. The gunner was an easy target, and the ball turret was often very difficult to escape when a bomber was badly damaged.
Author: Vance Bourjaily
First published: 1947
Bourjaily’s first novel caused reviewers to make complimentary comparisons to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), and for several decades it was regarded as one of the best American novels about World War II. The novel’s standing has, however, declined in proportion to the decline in Bourjaily’s broader reputation as a novelist. An autobiographical novel, The End of My Life presents the experiences of Skinner Galt, an ambulance driver in North Africa, who eventually recognizes that whatever meaning war may have on a political level, it is always an exercise in horrible absurdity for the individual soldiers.
Author: Colin MacDougall
First published: 1958
One of the most acclaimed Canadian novels about World War II, Execution was MacDougall’s only novel. It follows a Canadian infantry unit through the course of the Italian campaign, and, dramatically and thematically, it revolves around two executions. The first is the execution of two Italian deserters that the Canadians have adopted into their unit as cooks and genuinely like. The second is the execution of one of their own, a goodhearted but mentally limited soldier who has become involved with a group of soldiers engaged in the black market who murder an American.
Author: Shōhei Ōoka
First published: 1951, as Nobi
Set in the Philippines following the American invasion to retake the islands from the Japanese, this novel vividly details the experiences of a single Japanese soldier, Private Tamura. Ostracized by the soldiers in his unit, Tamura decides to desert and finds himself caught between the ambiguous battle lines, between soldiers on two sides who equally despise him and among a civilian population conditioned to hate him. His only recourse is to flee ever more deeply into the jungle, where survival is a more primal exercise and spectral experience than it is even on the battlefield.
Author: James Jones
First published: 1951
Jones’s first novel remains his best known. The first in a somewhat loosely connected trilogy, From Here to Eternity focuses on a group of American soldiers stationed in Hawaii in the months leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The main characters are Sergeant Milt Warden, who becomes involved in an affair with the wife of his commanding officer, and Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, who resists all sorts of pressure to fight on the company’s elite boxing team. Though it focuses of these and other individual soldiers, the novel is ultimately concerned with the prewar army as a self-defined institution.
Author: John Horne Burns
First published: 1947
Set in Naples after the American occupation of the city, the novel treats the relationships among American soldiers and between those soldiers and the civilian population in and around the Galleria Umberto Primo, an arcade of shops and bars at the center of the city. The novel’s opening and closing sections are called the “Entrance” and “Exit,” and the intervening chapters shift between nine chapters called “Portraits” and eight transitional sections called “Promenades.” Each “Portrait” focuses on the tensions that define an individual character, and each “Promenade” recounts, in the first person, a soldier’s experiences from the North African theater to Sicily to the invasion of Italy.
Author: James Gould Cozzens
First published: 1948
This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cozzens has long been regarded as one of the more significant American novels about World War II. Drawn broadly from Cozzens’s own experience as an information officer for General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, the commander of the U.S. Air Forces during the war, the novel remains one of the few to focus on the stateside military during the war. It centers on three days’ events on a Florida air base, emphasizing the ways in which the military bureaucracy and the personalities of individual officers intersect to define each other.
Author: Hans Hellmut Kirst
First published: 1954-1955, 1964
A committed Nazi who gradually became increasingly disaffected by the regime’s excesses and its corruption of German institutions, Kirst is now best known for his suspense novels, such as Night of the Generals (1963), but all of his novels have satiric elements, and the satire is very close to the surface in the Gunner Asch novels, for which he first received international acclaim. The first three novels were published as a trilogy called Zero Eight Fifteen (1955-1957). They include The Revolt of Gunner Asch (1955), Forward, Gunner Asch! (1956), and The Return of Gunner Asch (1957). These novels concern the increasingly absurd experiences of the title character, an enlisted man serving on the eastern front. A fourth volume, What Became of Gunner Asch (1964), follows the protagonist into the postwar years.
Author: John Hersey
First published: 1946
Now considered a forerunner of such movements or genres as the New Journalism, the nonfiction novel, and creative nonfiction, this slender volume sparely but movingly documents the aftermath of the dropping of the first
Author: Herman Wouk
First published: 1993 and 1994 respectively
This
Author: Dalton Trumbo
First published: 1939
This
Author: Nicholas Rinaldi
First published: 1999
The tiny, British-controlled island of
Author: James Clavell
First published: 1962
Clavell’s first novel is drawn from his own experiences as a
Author: Thomas Heggen
First published: 1946
Like Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951), Heggen’s novel has been adapted very successfully for stage and for film. Also like The Caine Mutiny, it focuses on the tensions between the captain and the crew, not on a big warship such as a carrier, battleship, or cruiser, but on a support ship. Unlike the destroyer converted to a minesweeper in The Caine Mutiny, however, the ship in Mister Roberts is a cargo ship operating far from the widely scattered battlefronts of the Pacific theater. The story presents a battle of wits between the well-meaning title character, respected by the crew but yearning for a combat assignment, and the ship’s captain, protecting his ship’s “clean” record by perversely exerting his authority.
Author: Norman Mailer
First published: 1948
Mailer’s first novel remains the most highly regarded American novel about World War II. Set on a Japanese-held island on which American forces have landed, the novel features a broad range of characters, but the three focal characters are the aristocratic and fascist-leaning General Cummings; his well-born but more egalitarian aide, Lieutenant Hearn; and the battle-hardened but hardly heroic Sergeant Croft. The novel provides ample illustrations of the brutality of combat in the Pacific, as well as manifold evidence of the disjunction between the abstraction of painstakingly developed campaign strategies and the fluid realities of the battlefield. It vividly explores the connections and disjunctions between the characters’ civilian lives and their military experiences.
Author: Jerzy Kosinski
First published: 1965
In his first and most enduring novel, Kosinski chronicles the experiences of a Jewish-looking young boy who is sent by his parents from a Polish city into the ostensible safety of the countryside. The peasants with whom the boy seeks refuge are typically as anti-Semitic as the Nazis, and his survival is something of a miracle resulting from completely accidental turns in circumstance, the intercession of a few beneficent individuals, and the boy’s own increasing store of survival skills. In the end, he is adopted into a Russian military unit and finds a father figure in an accomplished sniper. The novel’s closing provides a hopeful note about the boy’s capacity to transcend at least some of the trauma of his formative experiences.
Author: Alistair MacLean
First published: 1982
Not
Author: Alan Furst
First published: 1995
The third novel in Furst’s Night Soldiers series, The Polish Officer is set primarily in Poland after the German and Soviet conquest and partition of that nation. The main character, Captain Alexander de Milja, is an expert mapmaker who becomes a pivotal figure in the Polish underground and its attempts to support the Polish government in exile. He takes the lead in concealing Poland’s gold reserves from the Nazis and Soviets and in smuggling those reserves through Romania to Great Britain. While emphasizing de Milja’s courage and ingenuity, Furst also conveys the physical and psychological strain caused by his clandestine activities and his recurring impulse simply to save himself regardless of the cost.
Author: Edward L. Beach, Jr.
First published: 1955
Drawing on his own extensive service as a
Author: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
First published: 1969
With this novel and Cat’s Cradle (1963), Vonnegut made the dramatic transition from a little-known writer of speculative fiction to one of the leading literary voices of the counterculture period. In Slaughterhouse-Five, he startled readers by synthesizing aspects of historical and speculative fiction. The novel includes a lengthy and harrowing account of the American bombing of Dresden, seen through the perspective of American
Author: Richard Powell
First published: 1960
Set in the Pacific in the months following the American entry into World War II, this novel focuses on the effects of the war on the career of Lieutenant Colonel William A. Farralon. His assignment to a remote Pacific post serves as an unmistakable indication that his career is on a downturn. However, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and most of the other American and European bases in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Farralon takes advantage of a series of opportunities to distinguish himself. By the end of the war, he has risen to the rank of general, and his earlier fall from favor has been permanently eclipsed by his wartime service.
Author: James Jones
First published: 1962
In this loose sequel to From Here to Eternity (1951), Jones re-presents the major characters from that novel under similar names. This novel provides a fictional account of the Guadacanal campaign–in particular, the Battle for Hill 53. Jones emphasizes that the sense of unit cohesion provided the individual infantryman’s only psychological defense against the isolating terror of hand-to-hand combat in the hellishly tropical environment. In his later nonfiction study of the war and the art that it inspired, Jones contrasts the battle for Guadacanal, the outcome of which depended very much on the efforts of very small groups of Marines, with the corporatization of the war effort at Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, the outcomes of which were never in doubt–however much their ultimate cost in blood and matériel may have been miscalculated.
Author: Günter Grass
First published: 1959, as Die Blechtrommel
The Tin Drum is the first novel in Grass’s acclaimed Danziger Trilogie (1980; Danzig Trilogy, 1987), which also includes
Author: Nevil Shute
First published: 1950
The protagonist of this novel is Jean Paget, an Australian woman who is in Malaya at the time of the Japanese invasion and is detained for the duration of the war with a group of European women and children. During the course of their detainment, they are helped by an Australian
Author: Karl Shapiro
First published: 1944
Although Shapiro had a long and distinguished career, his literary reputation has faded to the point that it would come as a surprise to most students of modern American poetry that at the end of World War II he was widely regarded as one of the most accomplished and promising poets of his generation. Awarded a Pulitzer Prize, this collection was written while Shapiro was serving with the U.S. Army in the New Guinea campaign. Imitating the style and form of the letters that military personnel sent to their loved ones back home, the poems convey both the immediacy and the terrible strangeness of the war’s horrors. Likewise, they suggest the soldiers’ growing sense of disconnection from home and their increasingly desperate need to maintain some sense of connection to life beyond the war.
Author: John Hersey
First published: 1959
Hersey’s novel chronicles twenty-three bombing raids by a
Author: David L. Robbins
First published: 1999
One of the few noteworthy American novels about the eastern front of World War II, War of the Rats depicts the titanic battle for
Author: Gore Vidal
First published: 1946
This novel is notable because it is the debut effort of a long, prolific, and distinguished literary career, because it was regarded as the first “literary” novel about World War II to be published, and because it is the only significant novel to treat the
Author: Herman Wouk
First published: 1971
This immensely popular novel and its sequel, War and Remembrance (1988), are each nearly a thousand pages long, reflecting Wouk’s ambition to capture the whole scope of World War II as powerfully as he had captured it in microcosm in The Caine Mutiny (1951) two decades earlier. The novel is unified by being presented through the eyes of the widely scattered members of a single family, that of Victor “Pug” Henry, a naval officer who becomes a sort of personal emissary of and troubleshooter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This strategy no doubt increased the popularity of the novels, but for critics, it stretched credibility and made many aspects of the novel seem contrived, despite Wouk’s obvious efforts to ensure historical accuracy.
Author: Irwin Shaw
First published: 1948
Of all of the acclaimed American novels about World War II, Shaw’s The Young Lions has perhaps suffered the most precipitous decline in critical appreciation. Shaw was a real pro as a novelist, and his manipulation of the conventions of the realistic novel make some of his late novels a delight to read. This novel is perhaps a little too obviously “well made” in its presentation of the intersecting stories of three soldiers: a self-indulgent but charming product of privilege named Michael Whiteacre, a working-class Jew named Noah Ackerman, and a German officer named Christian Diestl.
Author: Richard Condon
First published: 1959
Condon has been described as one of the most paranoid novelists ever. Certainly this landmark novel of the Cold War captured the profound distrust on both sides of the conflict. The novel begins with the capture of a platoon of American soldiers by the Chinese during the Korean War. The soldiers are brainwashed into believing that Sergeant Raymond Shaw, an unlikely hero, has saved them from being massacred. Shaw receives the Medal of Honor, but after they all return to the United States, his captain, Bennett Marco, gradually uncovers the truth that Shaw has been programmed to perform a political assassination.
Author: Anton Myrer
First published: 1968
Although not highly regarded by literary critics, Meyer’s best-known novel is one of only two works of fiction on the recommended reading list for the U.S. Army’s Officer Professional Development program. The novel follows the careers of two officers over three decades, from World War I to the beginnings of the Cold War in the years immediately following World War II. The two officers are very different in temperament and mores. Sam Damon is an upright person in both his personal and his professional relationships; in contrast, Courtney Massengale is a much more Machiavellian character who has very little sense of personal loyalty. The novel provides an intimately knowledgeable account of how the military bureaucracy operates.
Author: Alexsander Solzhenitsyn
First published: 1983-1991, as Krasnoe koleso: includes Avgust chetyrnadtsatogo, 1971, expanded 1983 (August 1914, 1972, expanded 1989); Oktiabr’ shestnadtsatogo, 1984 (November 1916, 1999); Mart semnadtsatogo, 1986-1988 (partial translation as March 1917, 2006); Aprel’ semnadtsatogo, 1991 (partial translation as April 1917, 2006)
Solzhenitsyn will be most remembered for his two works about the Stalinist penal camps, Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha (1962; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1963) and Arkhipelag GULag, 1918-1956: Opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniya (1973-1975; The Gulag Archipelago, 1974-1978). However, The Red Wheel, his cycle of novels covering the years from the Russian entry into World War I to the collapse of the Russian monarchy in 1917, is a massive work of literary as well as historical merit. The Red Wheel includes
Author: John le Carré
First published: 1980
This is the third novel in le Carré’s Karla Trilogy, which also includes
Author: Leon Uris
First published: 1958
A
Author: James Michener
First published: 1953
The Bridges at Toko-Ri focuses on the experiences of carrier pilot Harry Brubaker. Having survived much air combat during World War II, Brubaker had just begun to settle comfortably back into civilian life when he was recalled to service in the Korean War. By the time that the mission to destroy the heavily defended bridges at Toko-Ri is announced, Brubaker is suffering from combat fatigue and has become haunted by the foreboding that he will not survive many more missions. Although he manages to destroy the last of the bridges, his plane goes down and he is killed by the Chinese infantry who have shot down the helicopter sent to rescue him.
Author: James Salter
First published: 1957
Like James Michener’s The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Salter’s first novel focuses on the air war over Korea, but Salter is much more interested than Michener in the way a fighter wing functions–in how the fighter pilots compete for recognition and their alliances and conflicts shape how they are led and how long they manage to survive. Despite the complex tactics on which each wing is trained and despite each pilot’s dependence in combat on the wingman with whom he is paired, flying fighters is ultimately a solitary test of the pilot’s skill, courage, endurance, and temperament. Salter’s protagonist, Cleve Connell, eventually downs a notorious MiG pilot known as “Casey Jones” but cannot provide confirmation of the “kill” and so attributes it to his own downed wingman.
Author: Richard Hooker
First published: 1968
Published at the height of the Vietnam War, adapted for an experimental film directed by Robert Altman, and providing the basis for one of the longest-running and most acclaimed television series of all time, this novel was based on Hornberger’s experiences as a battlefield surgeon during the Korean War and was actually more an irreverent take on military life than a pointedly
Author: Ha Jin
First published: 2004
Ha Jin’s highly regarded novel treats the Korean War from the Chinese perspective. The novel is framed as the memoir of its protagonist, Yu Yuan. Drafted into the Chinese army after the Communist takeover of China, he finds himself among the hundreds of thousands of troops sent across the Yalu River to drive back the United Nations forces that had routed the North Koreans. In addition to relating Yu’s experiences on the march and in battle during a bitterly cold winter, the novel treats his eventual capture by U.N. forces and his extended detention as a
Author: Frederick Forsyth
First published: 1974
The discovery of significant plutonium deposits in a small African nation governed by a dictatorial regime leads a British industrialist to underwrite a mercenary force to remove the existing government and to replace it with one more disposed to sell the mineral rights under favorable terms. The novel details the ways in which the mercenary force is recruited, given some cohesion as a unit, equipped and supplied, and clandestinely transported to the target nation. The novel is purportedly based on Forsyth’s own failed attempt to use a mercenary force to seize the small nation of Equatorial Guinea and to offer it as a haven for the Nigerian insurgents defeated in the Biafran War.
Author: A. E. W. Mason
First published: 1902
Following the
Author: V. S. Naipaul
First published: 1975
One of Naipaul’s most unsparing, harrowing novels, Guerrillas concerns an uprising against the continuing colonial influence on a Caribbean island. The three main characters are Roche, a South African exile with progressive political views; his disaffected lover, an Englishwoman named Jane, who mistakes her own world-weariness for depth of understanding and reliable judgment; and Jimmy, a political radical who disdains Roche and Jane but is willing to use them, and anyone and anything available to him, to promote his cause and his own movement toward the centers of power. The novel explores the ease with which the comfortable certainties of daily life can be undermined.
Author: Jay Cantor
First published: 1983
In this very ambitious first novel, Cantor has sought to re-create fictionally the life of the Cuban revolutionary,
Author: Michael Herr
First published: 1977
This book, a seminal work of the New Journalism, was published a decade after Herr traveled to South Vietnam to report on the Vietnam War for Esquire. The essays that he produced for that magazine as well as for Rolling Stone, New American Review, New York, and Crawdaddy were revised extensively and synthesized into the continuing narrative of the book. Nonetheless, that narrative consists largely of vignettes that convey, often with ironic or horrific immediacy, the “grunt’s” view of the war. The power of the narrative derives from Herr’s identification with the average soldier and his recognition that however close he comes to the fighting, he is more a witness than a combatant.
Author: Tim O’Brien
First published: 1978, revised 1989
The most acclaimed American novel about the Vietnam War, Going After Cacciato combines the documentary realism of O’Brien’s other books about the war with an extended episode of Magical Realism. The novel is divided into three types of chapters. The narrative is organized around ten “Observation Post” sections, set in November, 1968. In these sections, the main character, Paul Berlin, reflects on the ironies, paradoxes, improbabilities, and hard realities of the war. These sections also provide a narrative frame for the other two types of sections: his memories of his unit’s harrowing experiences in combat between June and October and an extended fantasy about his unit’s pursuit across two continents of the AWOL soldier Cacciato.
Author: Stephen Wright
First published: 1983
In this,
Author: Duong Thu Huong
First published: 2005
Perhaps the most internationally known Vietnamese dissident writer, Duong Thu Huong supported the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong cause during the Vietnam War. Following the reunification of the country, however, she became a critic of the abuses of power and the corruption that she felt had become endemic within the communist regime. Though not pointedly political, her once popular novels were banned, and she was imprisoned several times. In No Man’s Land, a missing-in-action North Vietnamese soldier returns home fourteen years after the end of the war. Although he has been physically and psychologically damaged by his wartime experiences, which are presented in flashback, his wife is pressured into leaving her current husband and their son, both of whom she loves dearly, and to endure the privations and humiliations of life with him.
Author: Larry Heinemann
First published: 1986
When this, Heinemann’s second novel, won the National Book Award, it was generally regarded as a very surprising choice. Like Heinemann’s first novel, which had been published nine years earlier, Paco’s Story concerns the experience of a Vietnam veteran. The title character is seeking a respite in which he can recuperate physically and psychologically from his wartime experiences. Although he finds a job washing dishes in a small-town restaurant operated by a sympathetic veteran of World War II, he cannot escape the stigma of having served in an unpopular war or the memories of the atrocities that he and his fellow soldiers committed in Vietnam. Much of the novel is narrated by the ghosts of the men in Paco’s unit who died in Vietnam.
Author: Graham Greene
First published: 1955
A truism about the Vietnam War has been that American involvement dated from the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu. In actuality, the United States supplied almost all of the military matériel used by the French against the Viet Minh, and American concern with checking Soviet influence, more than any American interest in preserving pre-World War II European empires, drove U.S. involvement in Vietnam from its clandestine beginnings. Narrated by Thomas Fowler, a world-weary British journalist, Greene’s novel explores the enigmatic character of Alden Pyle. Nominally an American aid worker, Pyle is clearly working for the Central Intelligence Agency to ensure that a South Vietnamese alternative to the Viet Minh will be available if the French do not prevail in the largely guerrilla war against them. Pyle is murdered, but not before he gets Fowler’s beautiful Vietnamese mistress.
Author: Bao Ninh
First published: 1993
Framed as a novel within a novel, The Sorrow of War presents a “fictional” account of the wartime experiences of Kien, a North Vietnamese veteran of the Vietnam War. The survival of any long-serving veteran of that prolonged conflict would be something of a miracle, but in several instances, Kien has been the only survivor of firefights, shellings, and bombings that have killed every other member of his unit. His extraordinary luck is, however, juxtaposed to the loss of his lover, whom he has known since their idyllic childhood, and the unreliability of others whom he has trusted.
Author: Denis Johnson
First published: 2007
A recipient of the National Book Award, Johnson’s novel seems a high mark in a steadily distinguished, if idiosyncratic, literary career. Certainly, Tree of Smoke stands out in a body of work consisting of very spare novels on eccentric subjects. It is a long and lushly descriptive fictional treatment of the Vietnam War. The main character is Skip Sands, an agent with the Central Intelligence Agency who serves in Vietnam from 1965 to 1970, or from the dramatic escalation of American involvement to the post-Tet Offensive recognition that deescalation, if not defeat, was inevitable.
Author: Andrew Huebner
First published: 2003
The most significant literary work written about the Gulf War of the early 1990’s, We Pierce is a fictionalized memoir or autobiographical novel drawn from Huebner’s own family history. The narrative focuses on two brothers, Sam and Smith Huebner. Sam is politically progressive, a teacher and writer whose emotional demons are exhibited in his deepening alcohol and drug abuse. Forgiving to a fault in terms of family issues, Sam paradoxically is very dogmatic in his political views, including his opposition to the Gulf War. In contrast, Smith serves with distinction as part of a tank crew during the conflict. Although he refuses to address the issues in their parents’ marriage and their upbringing, he has a contented marriage and does everything that he can to ensure that his own children’s home life is stable.
Author: Emmanuel Boundzéki Dongala
First published: 2005
Dongala explores the world of the “boy soldiers” who have become commonplace among the combatants in Africa’s civil wars because they are one of the largest segments of most African populations, because they are more easily indoctrinated than adult “recruits,” and because they can be more easily conditioned to witnessing and committing atrocities. The novel is drawn from Dongala’s experiences during the Republic of the Congo’s civil war in the late 1990’s. The title character has became a despicable, sociopathic character, and Dongala emphasizes how little he and his kind feel any connection to their country, its people, or its future.
Author: Lieve Joris
First published: 2008
Published
Author: Khaled Hosseini
First published: 2003
The story of the unlikely friendship of two boys in Afghanistan–one rich and one poor–is set against the backdrop of Afghanistan from the end of the monarchy through the wars of the present.
Literature and Warfare