Home » Reading & Literature » Great Books » Literary Soldiers of American War Literature

Literary Soldiers of American War Literature

© Kathleen D. Anderson

I am planning my lesson plans for my college English class on a cool and beautiful Sunday autumn day, when I discover that the U.S. has attacked Afghanistan in the aftermath of the WTC attacks.

As I sit and ruffle through the current Newsweek that my English class is using as a textbook for a college composition class, an old Bob Dylan song echoes in my head:

"Come you masters of war/You that build the big guns/You that build the death planes..."

An amazing song famous during the 1960's anti-war revolution.

But, in my head, I replace some of his words with my own: Come you Masters of War Writing/Those Who Tell us the Truths..."

Who are these Masters of "war" in writing?

The true masters of "war" are the fiction writers and poets of our present time and times past, the chroniclers and patriots and even the artists of resistance who help us find clarity of thought and perhaps gain a sense of peace in times of strife. There are many great literary "war" writers, but I have selected four American writers with front line experience as a good place to start:

Ernest Hemingway volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War 1 on the Italian front where he was seriously wounded. Fighting, violence, and army life are all depicted in his novel, Farewell to Arms, one of the most famous war novels ever written and well worth reading.

The second writer and a poet whose works are amazing is e.e. cummings. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he went to school at Harvard and, like Hemingway, worked in France as an ambulance driver during WW1. During the war he was subsequently interned in a prison camp by the French authorities for befriending another American with anti-war views. Three famous poems worth reading which are related to war are the following: "i sing of olaf," "plato told,"and "my sweet old etcetera."

Thirdly, there is Joseph Heller who was born in Brooklyn, New York and flew more than 60 missions in 1943 and 1944 during WWII as a B-25 wing bombardier for the United States Army Air Forces in Europe, earning the rank of first lieutenant. In his novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller created the absurd war resister Yossarian, who at one point, on a bombing run, asks his fellow crewmen: "Do you guys realize, we are going to bomb a city that has no military targets, no railroads, no industries, only people?"