War and military service have been major literary subjects as long as there has been literature. The earliest masterpiece of the Western tradition. Homer’s Iliad, portrays the heroism and human cost of the Trojan War, while its companion poem, The Odyssey recounts one veteran’s long and difficult homecoming. The great national epics, from the Aeneid of Imperial Rome to the Shahnameh of medieval Persia mostly commemorate the decisive military encounters that shaped each cultures history.
Many great authors have also been soldiers. The Greek playwright Sophocles, creator of Oedipus Rex, served as an Athenian general in the Peloponnesian War. The Roman poet Horus fought at the Battle of Philippi. Shakespeare’s friend and fellow playwright Ben Jonson served in the infantry in the Flemish Wars. Even the two Renaissance poets who first brought the sonnet to English, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, both were soldiers.
Other great writers have continued this tradition, from Spain’s Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, to Russia’s Leo Tolstoy, creator of War and Peace. War has also inspired its civilian witnesses to great literature, tending to wounded Union soldiers in the makeshift hospitals of Washington, D.C.. The poet Walt Whitman wrote about the devastation of the American Civil War. With heartfelt understand.
Ending during World War One. Ernest Hemingway served as a volunteer ambulance driver for the American Red cross on the Italian front, and was hospitalized with shrapnel injuries. He fictionalized his experiences in his novel A Farewell to Arms. While many American writers served in World War One, few participated in sustained combat, and their writing often reflects this absence. But World War Two was different.
For millions of Americans, the war was long, bloody and personal. Many of our greatest contemporary poets saw brutal combat and later wrote movingly about their wartime experiences. Including Pulitzer Prize winners Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemiroff, Louis Simpson and Richard Wilbur. Some writers served mostly stateside, like poet Randall Geral, who taught in flight school. Others took dangerous non-combat jobs, like novelist Ralph Ellison, who served in the U.S. Merchant Marine.
Our novelists in uniform addressed the war in their best works, including James Dickey, Shelby Foote, Joseph Heller, James Jones, John Oliver Kilns, Norman Mailer, James Salter, and Kurt Vonnegut. The pattern repeated with the Vietnam War, producing such singular literary talents as Philip Caputo, Joe Haldeman, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Tim O’Brien, Robert Stone, and Tobias Wolfe. One cannot tell the story of our nation without also telling the story of our wars, and these often harrowing tales are most vividly recounted by the men and women who lived through them.
Today’s American military is the best trained and best educated in our nation’s history. These men and women offer unique and important voices that enlarge our understanding of the American experience.
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