War Literature

By: Pauls Toutonghi

Source:

 The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature

War Literature

What text epitomizes the literature of war? A battlefield account by an American soldier? A work of fiction written at the time of a war? Or fiction written after a war, but set in a remembered zone of conflict? The poetry of the battlefield? The poetry of those left out of the battle? What about the literature of the interned? The literature of the violated? The literature of the displaced, of the indigenous peoples of America? The literature of the immigrants who arrived in the United States in the wake of foreign wars? The choices are innumerable.

What about the Cold War, a war that had no quantifiable beginning or end? It could be argued that the anxiety of the nuclear arms race was reflected, quite substantially, in twentieth-century American fiction and playwriting. Finally, the reader cannot forget great works of scholarship, such as Modris Eksteins's Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989), works that defined, in clinical and expository prose, the realities of fighting a modern, mechanized battle.

The Early Colonists and the War within

The experience of war—and its singular trauma and absurdity, its pathos and its brutality—has touched every generation of American writer. The earliest literature, produced as a result of experiences within America, was often printed in Europe. As returning colonial entrepreneurs, writers of North American experiences were often quite successful in their home countries. Arguably, the first of these was the Spanish envoy Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, who was captured and imprisoned by Indians in 1528. After he returned safely to Spain, Cabeza de Vaca published an account of his disastrous experience as a part of the Spanish Crown's expedition to Texas and Florida led by Pánfilo de Narváez. This book, The Journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and His Companions from Florida to the Pacific, 1528–1536 (1542), was the first to describe the indigenous peoples of the North American continent, and among the first to construct a narrative of war and imprisonment.

Indeed, Cabeza de Vaca's book would be the first of dozens of captivity narratives, books that formed the backbone of what could be considered early American literature. These stories were important for a variety of reasons, and typically featured the inhumane treatment of the author during his or her imprisonment after a Native American raid. Perhaps most critically, they established the indigenous peoples of the North American continent as an “other,” as irredeemably savage and fully fit for the colonial enterprise. Books ranging from John Smith's A True Relation of…Virginia (1608) to Mary Rowlandson's A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) to John Williams's The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion (1707) marginalized Native populations and fueled the land-grab opportunism of early settlers.

The Rise of American Nationalism

In the eighteenth century, works of journalism were the primary medium in which writers expressed their sentiments regarding war and warfare. At the beginning of the century, newspaper publishers had to contend with the censorship of the British Crown, which dictated what could and could not be published within America's colonial borders. James Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's brother, was among the first to defy this rule of law. In 1721 he established the New-England Courant. Although the Courant was banned two years later, it led to important publications such as the New-York Weekly Journal (1733). The Weekly Journal's publisher, John Peter Zenger, was acquitted of charges of seditious libel in 1735 with the help of young attorney Alexander Hamilton.

From 1735 through the American Revolution, newspapers such as Weekly Journal played a critical role in the dissemination of politically motivated calls for a war of independence. The first of John Dickinson's famous twelve letters opposing Britain's colonial legislation, collected as Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer (1768), appeared in the Boston Chronicle on 21 December 1767. The Letters was a strident document, and helped spur readers toward the looming war for separation from the British Empire.

The Revolutionary War and Nation Building

The latter decades of the eighteenth century saw a flowering of American imaginative literature, and an expansion of the ways that it dealt with the idea of war, and the need for independence. Although literacy was not predominant among the early colonists of America, the written word played a significant role in the Revolutionary War. Dramatic literature—widely read if not necessarily widely produced—fueled the push toward independence. Mercy Otis Warren's plays The Adulateur (1773) and The Group (1775) are barely disguised parodies of Thomas Hutchinson, royal governor of the Massachusetts colony, and express thinly veiled sentiments in favor of rebellion and American nationhood.

Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense (1776) helped fuel the fervor toward battle. It was widely and illegally distributed and read at town meetings and to the militia who assembled to overthrow the rule of the British colonial government. Common Sense asserted that British rule amounted to the “laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind.” Paine's work became a rallying point for a young American identity.

Importantly, the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the United States Constitution (1787) were also written documents. The act of writing these treatises has been historically interpreted as the most important act of American statehood, as the definitive midpoint and conclusion of the war with Britain. Thus, the salient act of American nationality is a written one; the Constitution can be viewed as a set piece of literature written in response to war.

This literary approach to the necessities of governing continued in the early days of the new Republic. Between October 1787 and May 1788, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison published a series of anonymous essays in New York newspapers, essays commonly referred to as The Federalist Papers. These essays argued for the ratification of the Constitution, and were instrumental in convincing readers of the New York Packet and the Independent Journal—two of New York's largest newspapers—to support ratification.

It is possible, then, to read these early works of the literature of war as primarily ones concerned with the why of war, and not with its specifics. There are some exceptions, of course. Predominantly, however, the face of battle—or the faces of those whose lands were destroyed in some way by the rampaging armies—were largely absent from the war literature of the time. Even as a few years passed, significant publications only celebrated the glory of the war's patriotism or the biographies of its generals and founders. John Marshall's significant biography The Life of George Washington (1805–1807) celebrated the war exploits of the nation's first president. Another celebratory work, Joel Barlow's epic poem The Columbiad (1807) was printed and distributed with widespread success. Though Barlow had first published it in 1787 as The Vision of Columbus, the edited version of this poem about the American Revolution had a stridently nationalistic tone.

The War Against Slavery

Perhaps the most critical battle in the history of American literature is the battle for the end of slavery, for the enfranchisement and human rights of the nation's African-American population. The degree to which the fight over the end of slavery influenced the unfolding of the Civil War remains a question of much scholarly debate.

What cannot be argued is the way in which the issue of slavery—and the efforts to eradicate it—brought war to the lives of numerous Americans. The question of whether Kansas would be admitted to the Union as a free or slave state touched off some of the bloodiest battles on American soil before the Civil War. The abolitionist John Brown's doomed raid of the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 has fascinated writers for more than one hundred fifty years, inspiring notable books as recent as Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter (1998). Nat Turner's slave rebellion—catalogued in his widely publicized memoir, The Confessions of Nat Turner; Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. (1831)—was one of many bloody battles in the attempt to rid the nation of slavery's yoke.

The literature of this struggle for freedom—its memoirs, novels, and newspaper reports—demonstrated to Americans of the mid-nineteenth century that their country was a nation torn by clashing ideologies. The abolitionist movement was spearheaded by William Lloyd Garrison, whose newspaper, The Liberator (1831–1865), advocated any social action that could bring about the end of slavery. Newspapers were the sole mass media of the Civil War era. As such, they fulfilled all of the functions of literature: sparking the passions and imaginations of readers, The Liberator was an important means of circulating social and political ideals.

Another critical form in this fight was the slave narrative. Although the slave narrative existed as an American literary form throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the form's widespread acceptance can perhaps be traced to 1845, when Frederick Douglass published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. A close collaborator with numerous New England abolitionists, Douglass traveled the nation giving lectures about his life experiences. He was in the vanguard of a surge in publication of slave narratives. Among the most powerful are the self-written works of the fugitive slaves Leonard Black (1847), Henry Watson (1848), and Henry Box Brown (1849).

The Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself, With Remarks upon the Remedy for Slavery was edited by Charles Stearns, a prominent Boston publisher and abolitionist. This text is uniquely important partly because of the physical torment and trauma that its author was forced to endure. It is also notable, however, for the remarks included by the volume's editor, remarks that stress the necessity of the end of slavery, even if the end is not achieved through peaceful means.

Narratives of slavery's trauma and the war to escape from its dominion were also written by women. Harriet Ann Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) was published during the Civil War. It detailed her life in slavery, which was a chronicle of depravity and sexual assault, as well as fear of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed slave owners to pursue escaped slaves into “free” states. Jacobs's work was used as a rallying point for the efforts to raise armies of enlisted men in the North, and to fight against the ideas represented by the fugitive slave legislation.

The novel—with its power to give dramatic weight and staging to the violent events of a conflict—was also influential in the history of the literature of the war to end slavery. Traditional interpretation of literary history cites Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (1852) as perhaps the most critical book in the struggle toward nationwide emancipation. Though the book has been treated quite poorly by recent critical work, it remains one of the best-selling novels of its time. It brought the conditions of slavery into the public view and prompted widespread concern for slavery's end. Further, it served as ammunition for those who would fight for its end, and oppose—with violence—the armies of the American South.

Poetry and Fiction of the Civil War

While the most widely read piece of Civil War literature is undoubtedly Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863), numerous other printed works influenced the literary environment of this time. In his introduction to The Norton Book of Modern War (1991), Paul Fussell writes that:

"It could be said that the American Civil War was the first modern one, for it was the first mass war fought in the industrial age, the first to rely on railroads and telegraph, armored battleships, fast-firing ordinance, and mass-produced, machine-made weapons, uniforms and shoes."

The modernity that he notes, of course, was also responsible for an accompanying rise in battlefield casualties. Battles increased in intensity as the mechanized slaughter of thousands of men could suddenly be concentrated into a meager number of hours. These hours, and their aftermath, were ably chronicled by numerous journalists and poets. Among these, however, perhaps none has achieved the widespread critical recognition and appreciation of Walt Whitman.

In his collection of poems Drum-Taps (1865), Whitman eulogizes the armies of young men flung into battle by the necessities of political conflict. It is in these poems that the brutalized soldier first stands as an individual, his torn and bloody body fully visible to the reader. In poems such as The Wound-Dresser, Whitman describes his journey through the hospital tents of the Union army. “As an old man bending I come among new faces,” he writes, and then catalogs the “clotted rags and blood,” the “stump of an arm,” “the amputated hand,” the “yellow-blue countenance” of the soldier dying from a deep wound in the side.

Although Whitman famously held, in his collection of journalism Specimen Days (1882), that “the real war will never get in the books,” his poetry and prose worked to imprint—indelibly—the legacy of the war in the American imagination. He is, without doubt, the best-known poet of the Civil War, and his outlook on its disastrous consequences has helped shape the way the American reading public considers the notion of war. Indeed, numerous historians have held that the Civil War has changed over the course of time, changing along with its historiography—along with the way the war was written.

Another major writer who wrote a key Civil War text was Herman Melville. Better known for his tale of whale hunting, Moby-Dick, Melville also wrote a collection of poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), which dealt with the war and its composite elements. Though it was not tremendously successful, Battle-Pieces was a significant statement on the war by one of the country's foremost writers. It stands among numerous other poems that sought to describe and illustrate the specifics and issues of the Civil War.

A work that has been noted by critics since its publication is John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867). Reviewed in the Atlantic Monthly by William Dean Howells, De Forest's novel is considered a precursor of American realist texts. It presents a measured and detailed analysis of the path of a wealthy family that moves, because of business interests, from the South to the North. Its refusal of sentimentality has been noted by critics seeking to establish the book as an influence on the later work of John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway.

However, the power of the Civil War on the American literary imagination can perhaps be illustrated by the fact that two of the most famous works written about the war were not published until the 1890s. Ambrose Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) was written at a time when Bierce was well known as a journalist and wit. The book consists of piquantly observed character sketches and cynical musings on the hypocrisy of power.

Moreover, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage was not composed and published until 1895. A staple of elementary and high school literature studies, The Red Badge of Courage follows a volunteer soldier in his first battle. It thus mirrors the experience of many readers, who approach the book without having lived through battle. Its images are wholly violent and visually traumatic; the soldier watches the slaughter of his comrades, then flees. Much was made both of the book and of the adversarial relationship between Crane and Bierce, who feuded in the prominent periodicals of the day.

Civil War Memoirs

The period immediately following the Civil War also saw a swell in the number of published memoirs. Soldiers and civilians flooded the market with the accounts of their lives. These accounts frequently focused on the battles in which the men had fought; more often than not, these were patriotic accounts, accounts that failed to emphasize the brutality of war. Among these numerous books, noteworthy is Thomas Wentworth Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870). Higginson was a well-known journalist. Throughout the war, he published articles in the Atlantic Monthly about subjects ranging from the specifics of battle to the rebellion of Nat Turner. His account of commanding the First South Carolina Volunteers contains a careful assessment of the racial questions of the period.

Other significant recollections include J. B. Jones's A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital (1866), Daniel G. Crotty's Four Years Campaigning in the Army of the Potomac (1874), and the memoirs of William Tecumseh Sherman (1875), one of the Civil War's most controversial soldiers. Sherman—infamous for his scorched-earth campaign through the South to the Gulf of Mexico—reflects on the mistakes he made as a general and warns the future of the danger of war's escalating mechanization and brutality.

This surge in memoirs did not subside for a number of years. Ulysses S. Grant published his memoirs in 1885, shortly before his death. By this time, he had served as president of the United States (1869–1877), and his administration had been excoriated for its corruption in the Whiskey Ring scandal. His memoir was a national best-seller, and used a stoic wit and close attention to detail to describe Grant's career in the Civil War.

The publication of Civil War memoirs extended into the early years of the twentieth century, when the last survivors of the era began to die. Susie King Taylor's Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers (1902) has only recently taken its rightful place among the Civil War's great memoirs. It deals with a range of complex issues, and still enlivens academic debate of the ways in which race was treated in the militias of the North.

A final salvo, perhaps, came from Mary Chesnut, the wife of a prominent figure in the government of South Carolina during secession. What is now known as Mary Chesnut's Civil War was first published as A Diary from Dixie (1905). This work is an intensely literary text, to which Chesnut—the author of several novels—gives a lush and fictive tone.

Manifest Destiny

The question of whether or not to include the story of the U.S. Army's forcible expansion westward—as well as the story of the violent warfare thrust upon the indigenous inhabitants of the North American continent—should not even be debated. Without a doubt the bloodiest and most protracted war in American history, the struggle to displace the Native Americans is cataloged in a long literature of warfare. What are the salient aspects of this particular war literature? In this case, the war became a micromanaged war, in which the tyranny of power brought its violence down upon a people solely because of their ethnic heritage. The locus of the war, then, became the Native American individual.

The literature of this war for land can be considered in the scope of its various struggles and fights. The Trail of Tears—the forced removal of the Cherokee people from their homes in Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee to Oklahoma Territory—occurred from 1838 to 1839, and inspired a range of writing. Documents referring to this component of the war are chronicles of failed peace, of government deception, and of genocidal legislation, such as the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which provided a legal basis for the violent confiscation of lands controlled by Native peoples.

From this era, some voices raised literary protest over the violence forced upon the natives. William Apess wrote Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts, Relative to the Mashpee Tribe (1835), which was a direct protest of state law. Apess was also involved in the Boston literary and political scene, working with William Lloyd Garrison on the staff of The Liberator. It has also been a setting for contemporary writers who wish to look back and reconsider this era—among the first violent struggles of the Indian wars. Diane Glancy's novel Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears (1996) is set in this warlike milieu.

The Indian Wars

After the Civil War, the Indian wars began in earnest, and federal troops initiated a systematic program of extermination, culminating with the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee on 29 December 1890. In the intervening twenty-five years, numerous Native American leaders spoke out against the process of white settlement on Indian lands. In various interviews with the press, leaders such as Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, and Crazy Horse argued that the land of America was being unjustly seized from their stewardship.

Once of the most mythologized battles of the Indian wars occurred at the Little Bighorn River in Dakota Territory on 25 June 1876. General George Armstrong Custer and his men were all killed during the course of this battle, and the popular media seized upon this battle, turning it into further ammunition in the war to subdue Native American resistance. Long before the battle, Custer had been sending dispatches to New York from the frontier, dispatches that were originally published in Galaxy magazine, and subsequently collected in his book My Life on the Plains (1874). After his death, Custer was lauded as a hero, and his friends and relatives published numerous accounts of his life, accounts such as Elizabeth Bacon Custer's “Boots and Saddles”; or, Life in Dakota with General Custer (1885).

Assessment of the warrior whom Custer harassed and who ultimately took Custer's life—Crazy Horse—took some more time to reach the history books. Widely vilified until the latter half of the twentieth century, Crazy Horse has emerged in more recent literature as a heroic figure. Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983) ponders the influence of Crazy Horse's story on Leonard Peltier, the imprisoned Native American Rights activist. The noted historian Stephen E. Ambrose wrote a balanced consideration of both men, Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (1986). Also, Larry McMurtry has written a definitive biography, Crazy Horse (1999).

Another critical figure of the period who has received a great deal of attention is Chief Joseph. Joseph was the leader of the Nez Percé tribe of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, and defeated U.S. Army troops in several engagements during the Nez Percé War of 1877 before his surrender. The speech he made at his surrender, which ended with the statement, “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever,” decreed an end to his fight against the U.S. government and was reprinted in an 1879 interview with the North American Review. Included in Merrill D. Beal's book “I Will Fight No More Forever”: Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce War (1963), Chief Joseph's speech is a stunning, and weary, indictment of the hostile government policies.

Finally, consideration must turn to the battle at Wounded Knee, at which more than three hundred Sioux Indians, many women and children, were massacred by U.S. Army troops on 29 December 1890. The incident has animated the imaginations of numerous writers. Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West has received a great deal of critical attention since its publication in 1971. Another notable work, Reneé Sansom Flood's Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota (1995), uses the massacre as the point of departure for a moving and interesting work of biography. In Lost Bird, Flood catalogs the life of one of the few Sioux survivors of that battle—an orphaned girl.

A chronological digression that must be mentioned is James Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), which is set during the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Although it could be included in the literature of nation building—it stratifies and codifies the imagined Indian as an “other”—The Last of the Mohicans is especially powerful if the reader keeps in mind the intense slaughter and exile that followed its publication by only a few years.

The Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection

The role of the media in the Spanish-American War, and its successor, the Philippine Insurrection (also known as the Filipino-American War), cannot be underestimated. Both William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World profited directly from publishing sensational accounts of the situation in Cuba. Columnists for both papers embellished stories of valiant Cuban resistance against the colonial powers of Spain, and when the battleship USS Maine was sunk in Havana's harbor on 16 February 1898, Hearst ran unproven headlines blaming forces loyal to the Spanish government. Public outcry in the United States led to a declaration of war. The United States invaded Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Philippines in the Pacific, where its forces quickly defeated the forces of the Spanish navy. A good historical consideration of this period is Charles Brown's The Correspondents' War: Journalists in the Spanish-American War (1967).

In the United States, public sentiment largely supported the war against Spain. However, President William McKinley indicated that, under the newly ratified Treaty of Paris (6 February 1899), he intended to maintain the Philippines as an American colony. In Manila, Philippine forces were hostile to the American occupation, leading to an insurrection that lasted until 1902 and was America's first protracted war in Asia.

A small group of writers and intellectuals rose up against this occupation. Mark Twain was at their forefront, and he wrote numerous newspaper articles and speeches advocating a return of the Philippines to Filipino forces. On commission for a women's magazine, Twain wrote The War Prayer, an antiwar short story that was not published until it was collected into the volume Europe and Elsewhere in 1923. The War Prayer deals with complex issues of religion and war, criticizing the official role that churches played in the sanctification of battle. The War Prayer is an eloquent statement against war, written by one of the nation's most notable writers.

World War I

Although the United States would not become involved in the continental war in Europe until 1917, the violence experienced by many of the nation's young writers in 1917 and 1918 shaped the work of a generation. This Lost Generation of writers is known for work haunted by an awareness of brutality, and the senseless nature of organized violence. One of the first voices to describe the despair of the mechanized war experience was John Dos Passos. His work Three Soldiers (1921) raised numerous objections to the sufferings of war.

The Lost Generation consisted of American expatriates living abroad in Europe. Though the war does not often appear directly in their work, its influence can be traced; it haunts the texts, an ephemeral background. Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), for example, is based on his own experiences as an ambulance driver on the battlefields of Europe during World War I. Like Hemingway, the main character of A Farewell to Arms is wounded in battle. Hemingway's book speaks eloquently of the senseless nature of armed conflict.

Before World War I, much American writing was steeped in the language of patriotism. The idea of the soldier was an idea steeped in the perceived glories of combat. Combat was, for early American writers, the physical expression of the willingness to fight for an ideal, and thus a worthy end for those who died in it. But with World War I, much of this changed. Fictional characters of this time period can be seen struggling with the meaning of the death and destruction that they witness. Poets pick up on Walt Whitman's description of the carnage of battle and extend it—expanding the poetic vocabulary to include the falsity of the war in which war has been depicted in the literature of the past.

Plays dealt explicitly with this subject matter. Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings collaborated on the well-received work What Price Glory? (1924), which cast a caustic eye on governments willing to send their young men into battle. Anderson would later write The Eve of St. Mark (1942), a significant World War II play. Women writers also had an important role, with poets such as Amy Lowell writing several key antiwar poems. Many of these voices are collected in Margaret Higonnet's anthology Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I (1999).

The alienation of the narrator, the loneliness of the individual before the required experiences of social life—experiences such as conscription into the army and battle—these are similarities shared by modern literature and modern warfare. Ezra Pound's long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, Life and Contacts (1920) turns at one point to contemplation of the war that has just passed:

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them.
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

The acerbic, caustic narrative voice is steeped in bitterness as a “botched” civilization that would willingly butcher so many of its best young men. American poetry of the battle—all attempts at describing the war in a poetic sense—was influenced by T. S. Eliot's remarkable The Waste Land (1922), one of the hallmarks of modernist literature. Eliot worked as a contemporary to Pound and E. E. Cummings, whose poem “next to of course god America i” (1922), which declares, with stinging irony:

why talk of beauty what could be more beautiful than these heroic happy dead

Like many college-age Americans, Cummings volunteered to serve in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. His experiences embittered him toward both war and standard poetic diction; like many Lost Generation writers, he struggled with his experiences in the trenches. His novel based on his wartime days, The Enormous Room (1922), was one of the most significant works of the period. William Faulkner also had critical works about the war—Soldiers' Pay (1926) and A Fable (1954)—though he was an inveterate liar and tale-teller about his own armed service.

The Spanish Civil War

Ernest Hemingway would also play an important role in the Spanish civil war, a war that, though it was not fought on American soil or with U.S. troops, nonetheless attracted a fair number of American combatants. Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is the story of an American who dies in this conflict, and it is a sprawling, dramatic work in support of the then-defeated Loyalist armies. The roster of American writers who traveled to Spain to issue journalism reads like a roster of the form's luminaries: Lillian Hellman, Archibald MacLeish, William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, John Steinbeck, Sherwood Anderson, John Dewey, and Martha Gellhorn. Most of these writers supported the Loyalist cause, a cause that ultimately failed in 1939, resulting in the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

The Fiction of World War II

Until the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 spurred the American imagination into the fray of World War II, there were numerous advocates of nonintervention in what was perceived as a mostly European war. The publishing world had saturated Americans with images of the traumatic fighting of World War I, and few of its citizens believed that intervention was necessary. With the economy only sluggishly beginning to recover from the Great Depression, there seemed to be numerous arguments against war. The America First Committee—an organization that opposed to the deployment of U.S. troops abroad—counted such prominent citizens as Charles Lindbergh among its members. Once the United States was attacked, however, the country was soon on a war footing, in both Asia and Europe.

The literature of World War II is detailed and voluminous. Streamlined techniques of production and distribution contributed to the issue of a breadth of writings unparalleled in any previous conflict. Immediately after the cessation of hostilities in 1945—and the lift of wartime limits on the consumption of goods such as paper—the literature of war began to come out of the publishing houses. There were the usual memoirs of soldiers, as well as memoirs written by those left behind. There was war poetry. Indeed, the American publishing industry embraced all aspects of the war experience with vigor.

Numerous important works of fiction have dealt with questions raised by World War II. Saul Bellow's slender first novel, The Dangling Man (1944), relates the story of a young man who is waiting, with some degree of agony, for his draft notice. Gore Vidal's critically important first novel, Williwaw (1946), tells an elegant adventure story set within the broad spectrum of the armed conflict. John Horne Burns's novel The Gallery (1947) tells of the experiences of an American GI in postwar Italy. Even writers who normally wrote light fictions applied themselves to the World War II, such as Irwin Shaw with his melodrama The Young Lions (1948).

Perhaps the largest-selling book was Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948). Told from the perspective of a veteran returning to America, this book follows the exploits of a marine platoon deployed in the Southeast Asia theater. It does not comment on war, but simply presents the war in gritty, foul detail, and thus issues a commentary through implication.

Mailer's work can be considered the midpoint between the popular fictions that sought, as their primary goal, to entertain their audiences, and the serious stylistic experiments that came from more literary writers. John Hawkes wrestled with his time as an ambulance driver in Germany to create the novel The Cannibal (1949), published when he was just twenty-three. Gertrude Stein, in Wars I Have Seen (1945) and Brewsie and Willie (1946) also confronted war with her unique literary perspective.

The novels did not stop with the end of the 1940s. James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951) was a romantic sprawl of a war novel, simultaneously sad and violent and couched in the tradition of gritty war reporting. He also wrote The Thin Red Line (1962), which was published in the same year as Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1962), which has sold over eighteen million copies. Indeed, the fiction of the war has accumulated steadily, with many of the writers who experienced the war still alive and willing to write about it. Notable among these fictional representations of warfare is Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut, which is based on his experiences as a survivor of the fire bombing of Dresden. Gravity's Rainbow (1973), a work by experimental American author Thomas Pynchon, as well as Ceremony (1977), Leslie Marmon Silko's dramatic work about the readjustment of a Native American soldier who has endured great trauma in World War II, are also important.

The market for war fiction shows no signs of relenting. As recently as 2002, James McBride published a critically lauded war-based novel, Miracle at St. Anna, which follows the exploits of an all-black regiment trapped in the mountains of Italy, cut off from their incompetent generals and pinned down by two fascist armies. It is a riveting and elegantly written war novel.

However, much of the fiction written since the end of World War II lacks the record of scholarship that marks the writing produced concomitant with or immediately after the war. Which of these myriad works will have a lasting impact on the American literary environment? That remains to be seen. What can be expected is that works such as John Okada's No-No Boy (1976)—that deal with previously neglected subjects such as the Japanese internment during the war—will last and undergo a large volume of critical reading.

The Poetry of World War II

The American poetry of World War II is somewhat more epigrammatic than the fiction. Whereas war novels were frequently over six hundred pages, the American poems of World War II tend to be short and precise. Randall Jarrell's The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner (1968) is perhaps the best known of the poems, with its haunting final line, “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” Jarrell's poems about the war are frequently written from the perspective of the dead; for this reason they have a haunting immediacy that makes their language quite memorable.

Frequently, individual poems, such as Robinson Jeffers's Fantasy, Thomas McGrath's Crash Report, Muriel Rukeyser's Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars), or Denise Levertov's Life at War, have achieved widespread fame. Richard Eberhart's The Fury of Aerial Bombardment is one of the most vivid and lyrically intricate poems to come out of any conflict, and place itself in the canon of American literature. Collections of poems focused around the war, however, have been somewhat rare. Equally short—but powerful—are the Japanese-American internment camp haiku, which have been collected in numerous volumes, including the Oxford Book of War Poetry (1984), edited by Jon Stallworthy.

The Memoirs of World War II

On the eve of American involvement in World War II, Bob Hoffman published his memoir, I Remember the Last War (1940), in an attempt to dissuade the populace of the United States from going into battle again. He warned against the physical danger into which American boys would be forced to go.

Following the pattern of all American wars up until this point, however, the years during the war saw a surge in the patriotism of the general populace. From 1941 to 1945, the stories circulated about the war were primarily news reports from the peripheries of combat; even these were frequently edited and censored. In the years immediately following the war, there were numerous memoirs written about wartime. The experience of war—throughout American history—has typically prompted an exhaustive written response. War has convinced thousands of writers of the noteworthy nature of their lives. This is part of the allure of the experience; its power to build identities can frequently serve as a mask for its more insidious and sorrowful dimensions.

The genre of reportage—carefully imagined nonfiction writing from everyday life—was widely practiced during World War II. The war correspondents published their writings in numerous stateside publications, and some, like Ernie Pyle, died in battle. Others, like William L. White, survived, and continued to write for years following the conflict.

When approaching the autobiographical writing of World War II, however, the reader is best served by consulting one of the numerous recent anthologies, anthologies grouping many different types of first-person memoir. The recollections of soldiers, as always, are in plentiful supply. Resources such as The Two World Wars: A Selective Bibliography (1964) or Gwyn M. Bayliss's comprehensive volume Bibliographic Guide to the Two World Wars: An Annotated Survey of English-Language Reference Materials (1977) are quite helpful. For slightly more uncommon perspectives on the war, a number of resources are available. Yvonne Klein edited the helpful volume Beyond the Home Front: Women's Autobiographical Writing of the Two World Wars (1997). C. Tyler Carpenter and Edward H. Yeatts coauthored the dual memoir Stars without Garters: The Memoirs of Two Gay GIs in World War Two (1996).

The American Literature of the Holocaust

Perhaps no literature of war bears a heavier burden than the literature of the Holocaust, a burden fraught with the difficulty of expressing a mechanized brutality that has no precedent in world history. Although most accounts of the Holocaust were written by survivors (with a few notable exceptions), these survivors were also predominantly European Jews, and published their memoirs in languages other than English. Among American writers who grappled with the Holocaust, however, few are as noted as Elie Wiesel, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. His novel Night (1958) can be read as a hybrid of memoir and fiction. Originally written as Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), Wiesel's text was somewhat longer and based more on factual representation, Night was an abridgment. Born 30 September 1928 in Romania, Wiesel is a death camp survivor—of Auschwitz, Buna, Buchenwald, and Gleiwitz. He has been in the United States since 1956 (naturalized in 1963), and teaches at Boston University and other colleges. He shares with some other Holocaust survivors the experience of immigrating to America after World War II, establishing a place in the nation's consciousness and literature.

Factual collections of Holocaust literature belong to the history of the voiceless, the nameless dead, and the testimony of witnesses. Numerous American scholars have tried, with varying degrees of success, to reassemble and recreate a literature of the six million dead. Basic factual resources are important to this segment of American literature. Lucy S. Dawidowicz's The War against the Jews (1975), as well as Martin Gilbert's The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (1986) and Mindy Weisel's edited volume Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss (2000), are critical texts. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001), written by Ruth Kluger, besides being a harrowing personal memoir also references other key texts of survival.

An excellent resource for students who seek to grasp the complexities of the literature of the Holocaust is Daniel Schwarz's readable and carefully reasoned Imagining the Holocaust (1999). Schwarz surveys the imaginative literature of the Holocaust, including such important works as John Hersey's The Wall (1950), Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (1965), Leslie Epstein's King of the Jews (1979), Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List (1982), Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl (1989), and even Art Spiegelman's critically acclaimed graphic novel Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986). Hersey's book, written from his perspective as a non-Jewish observer of the Holocaust, followed closely after his other critically acclaimed works about war, A Bell for Adano (1944), and Hiroshima (1946). This is, of course, only a partial list of the fiction.

Numerous important questions—such as what it means for a voice that is not that of a survivor to tell a story about the Holocaust—orbit around this literature. Poetry still is being written and collected, both about the Holocaust itself as well as about the legacy of having parents or grandparents who survived or lost their lives. Anna Rabinowitz's collection of poems Darkling (2001), circles these very themes. The American poetry of the Holocaust is capably represented in the volume edited by Charles Fishman, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (1991). This wartime genocide also continues to be considered and recast by contemporary American literature. Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002) was among the best-selling volumes of literary fiction in its year of publication.

The Wars in Asia

The Korean and Vietnam wars were obviously quite different, and the impulse to group them together in one subheading can be questioned. However, they do represent two military involvements on the continent of Asia, separated by just over ten years. From the perspective of warfare, the Korean War was much more conventional—featuring opposing armies of troops, engaged in open battle in a traditional sense. In fact, it could be argued that this was the last American war of this type in modern history. The Vietnam War was an exercise in guerrilla combat, with the battlefield more fluid, and located most solidly in the minds of individual soldiers.

The literatures of these wars differed vastly as well. The Korean War was a short war (1950–1953). Although its chief military figures—Dwight Eisenhower and General Douglas MacArthur—both wrote memoirs, far more interesting are the stories written by the soldiers on the ground or Korean-Americans in the United States. These works range across the limits of perspective and emotion.

Two notable works of fiction have appeared partly from the Korean War, and are widely divergent in their approach to the ideas of conflict, war, and perspective. James Salter's The Hunters (1956) and Susan Choi's The Foreign Student (1998) are interesting counterpoints for study of the war's resultant literature. Numerous surveys of literature and remembrances also have been issued over the years. An excellent starting point is either Philip West and Suh Ji-Moon's volume Remembering the “Forgotten War”: The Korean War through Literature and Art (2001) or Carina Del Rosario's A Different Battle: Stories of Asian Pacific American Veterans (1999).

Vietnam was a much more prolonged conflict, and involved more American soldiers. The casualties of Vietnam extended beyond the battlefield: scarred veterans, unable to adjust to life after guerrilla warfare, and a divided populace, many of whom did not support the conflict. It can be argued that the residual effects of Vietnam on the general public were as significant as the American Revolution or Civil War. A panoply of voices arose from Vietnam, both during and after the conflict.

Among the most successful voices is that of Tim O'Brien, whose novels and short fiction—particularly the work of the interrelated stories in The Things They Carried (1990)—catalog the senseless brutality and unpredictable trauma of this jungle-based conflict. They also consider questions of return to society, and whether or not this experience was possible after the war. Some of his stories capture the anguish of drafted young men, who must choose between evading the draft by leaving family and country, or going to fight in a war in which they do not believe.

Other voices deserve recognition. Daniel Lang's 1969 New Yorker article Casualties of War was published in book form and made into a film (1989) directed by Brian De Palma. Two critical works have great importance: Philip H. Melling's Vietnam in American Literature (1990) and Philip D. Beidler's Re-writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation (1991). The dauntingly titled Vietnam Reader: The Definitive Collection of American Fiction and Nonfiction on the War (1998), edited by Stewart O'Nan, is indeed comprehensive, though perhaps not definitive.

Contemporary Terrors: The Cold War and 11 September

The ironic opening of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is quite telling:

"For more than a year, ominous rumors have been privately circulating among high level western leaders, that the Soviet Union had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the ultimate weapon, a doomsday device."

With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the popular media made much of the idea that the United States was now the sole superpower in the world, and that this would ensure the safety and stability of human society into the future. Yet, as the conflicts in the Persian Gulf and Yugoslavia have illustrated, as long as the nation maintains a standing army, its forces will be ensnared in conflicts around the world.

Furthermore, with the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, American soil has once again become the locus of war. This war shares numerous similarities, psychologically, with the conflict in Vietnam. Its battlefields and combatants are largely invisible, largely unknown. The New Yorker has already devoted an entire issue to the response of America's writers to the terror attacks (2001). Beyond this, however, the literature of this new war remains unwritten.

See also Autobiography: White Women during the Civil War; Crane's The Red Badge of Courage; Hemingway, Ernest; Jarrell, Randall; Mailer, Norman; O'Brien, Tim, and his The Things They Carried; Vietnam in Poetry and Prose; Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five; and Whitman, Walt.

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