Lundberg, David. “The American Literature of War: The Civil War, World War I, and World War II.” American Quarterly. 36.3, 1984. 373-388.

Of my sources, the most succinct history of American war literature from the Civil War through WWII. Helpfully groups writers in kind and explains the shifts in writing styles and themes with regard to both the wars and importantly the American culture. Provides analysis of the American reactions to the wars.

“The term ‘war literature,’ as Jeffery Walsh suggests, may seem too restrictive, implying as it does a genre of writing entirely separate from that done in a ‘peacetime,’ whereas in reality there is often an often an overlap between the two” (Lundberg 373).

“Certainly in this century war has been ‘total,’ obliterating the distinction between soldier and civilian, blurring the difference between peace and war” (Lundberg 373).

“Most Americans eventually came to associate the Civil War with Stephen Crain’s The Red Badge of Courage, a book written in 1895 by an author born in 1871 who knew of the fighting only at second hand” (Lundberg 374).

“So overwhelming was the slaughter that survivors found it could not be described in conventional terms. New forms of writing were needed. Indeed, a new literary consciousness was required. As a result, the literature created the war poets and novelists—Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, and others—differed from any produced before. Gone were the lofty sentiments and inflated rhetoric of the Victorians and Edwardian periods which glorified war and sanctified death. War was now portrayed as horrible and senseless; death as brutal and meaningless. Suffering and destruction were described in an ironic, detached manner” (Lundberg 377).

“English war literature, especially the novels published after 1928, was characterized by a feeling of disillusionment, hopelessness, and even despair” (Lundberg 377).

“Both show [literary historians Charles Genthe in American War Narratives, 1917-1918 and Leonard in Above the Battle] that nearly all accounts published in America from 1914 to 1918 hid the true nature of the fighting in France beneath a haze of romantic prose” (Lundberg 378).

“John Dos Passos’ One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921) E.E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922), and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Times (1925) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) have been lumped together as a collective expression of American disillusionment with World War I. In them the war was depicted as impersonal, unheroic, and brutal. Soldiers became mere cogs in the war machinery, crushed by military bureaucracies or annihilated by machine guns or cannon fire. These conditions made bravery meaningless, an empty gesture” (Lundberg 379).

“There is no question World War I made a deep impression upon Dos Passos, Cummings, Hemingway, but by itself it did not instill a sense of disillusionment in them. Rather, the war accelerated and intensified their doubts about the prevailing cultural standards of American society, doubts that they held even before the United States entered the fighting” (Lundberg 380-381).

“War literature of the 1920s and 1930s frequently condemned the mechanized, impersonal nature of modern war produced by the application of science to the techniques of killing” (Lundberg 381).

“By the late 1920s the antiwar view of Dos Passos and Hemingway, previously confined to a small group of ‘disenchanted’ writers and intellectuals, began to gain wider public acceptance” (Lundberg 383).

“Much of the war in the 1930s—William March’s Company K (1930), Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory (1935), and especially Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1939)—reiterated the view that World War I was pointless. All of this fits in with the isolationist sentiments of the period” (Lundberg 383).

“If the hero of the World War I air warfare was the solitary fighter pilot, in World War II it was the bomber crew, a cohesive body of men encased in a huge machine, all working together with assembly-line efficiency” (Lundberg 384).

“Most important of all, World War II was truly ‘total’ in the sense of involving entire populations with few distinctions being made between combatants and noncombatants . . . As the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki demonstrated, it was often just as dangerous to be behind the front lines as to be in them” (Lundberg 385).

“During those critical postwar years the Cold War stifled the antimilitary war novel” (Lundberg 386).

“If total war eliminated the difference between civilians and soldiers, the Cold War muddied the once-clear distinction between war and peace” (Lundberg 387).

“For Mailer, then, World War II was not a discrete event, framed by times of peace, but rather a continuation of conditions that preceded it and a rehearsal for what will follow” (Lundberg 387).

“Heller saw the war as a complete muddle in which rationality was turned on its head with madness becoming a form of sanity . . . Heller’s ‘enemy’ was the military bureaucracy that created such conditions, a bureaucracy of our own making. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut blended science-fiction and fantasy into a . . .” (Lundberg 387).

“For Vonnegut and Heller the enemy was neither German nor Japanese, but the bureaucratic military mind that has produced Total War, a concepts used to justify genocide and the systematic destruction of cities and civilian populations” (Lundberg 388).

“War as a distinct entity separate from peace has been eliminated by the Cold War, and in a sense all literature written in the shadow of the nuclear age in war literature. If Tolstoy’s classic were to be written about eh modern period, its title would appropriately by War/Peace instead of War and Peace” (Lundberg 388).