When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations. In 1943, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks, for troops to carry in their pockets and their rucksacks, in every theater of war. Comprising 1,200 different titles of every imaginable type, these paperbacks were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy; in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific; in field hospitals; and on long bombing flights. They wrote to the authors, many of whom responded to every letter. They helped rescue "The Great Gatsby" from obscurity. They made Betty Smith, author of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," into a national icon. "When Books Went to War "is an inspiring story for history buffs and book lovers alike.

Young Lions was shortlisted for this year's National Jewish Book Award. Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman MailerAEs The Naked and the Dead to Joseph HellerAEs Catch-22 , and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American publicAEs ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new oJewisho war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism.

Product Description: Ichiro Takayoshi's book argues that World War II transformed American literary culture. From the mid-1930s to the American entry into World War II in 1941, preeminent figures from Ernest Hemingway to Reinhold Neibuhr responded to the turn of the public's interest from the economic depression at home to the menace of totalitarian systems abroad by producing novels, short stories, plays, poems, and cultural criticism in which they prophesied the coming of a second world war and explored how America could prepare for it...read more

Product Description: When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations...read more

Outsider Citizens examines a foundational moment in the writing of race, gender, and sexuality––the decade after 1945, when Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, and others sought to adapt existentialism and psychoanalysis to the representation of newly emerging public identities. Relyea offers the first book-length study bringing together Wright and Beauvoir to reveal their common sources and concerns. Relyea's discussion begins with Native Son and then examines Wright's postwar exile in France and his engagement with existentialism and psychoanalysis in The Outsider. Beauvoir met Wright during her postwar tour of America, chronicled in America Day by Day. After returning to France, Beauvoir adapted American social constructionist concepts of race as one source for her philosophical investigation of gender in The Second Sex, while also rejecting 1940s psychoanalytic theories of femininity. Relyea examines later representations of race and gender in a discussion of James Baldwin's critique of postwar American liberalism and ideals of innocence and masculinity in Giovanni's Room, which represents the remaking of white American identity through the risks of exile and the return of the gaze.

Product Description: In the first comprehensive study of the American male poets of World War II, Diederik Oostdijk gives voice to the literary men still considered to be a part of the Silent Generation. Focusing not only on soldier poets, but also on conscientious objectors and those deemed unfit for military service, Among the Nightmare Fighters sheds light on the struggles faced by writers--including Randall Jarrell, Anthony Hecht, Robert Lowell, Howard Nemerov, William Stafford and others--from the onset of the U...read more

Product Description: This study explores the war poetry of nine American veterans who served during World War II. It compares the efforts of those men who had established themselves as poets prior to or during the war (Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, John Ciardi, and William Meredith) with those whose poetic careers developed after the war ended (Louis Simpson, James Dickey, Richard Hugo, Howard Nemerov, and Lincoln Kirstein)...read more

Product Description: In March 1942, a desperate period for the allies in World War II, John Steinbeck published his propaganda novel The Moon is Down­—the story of ruthless invaders who overrun a militarily helpless country.  Throughout the novel, Steinbeck underscored both the fatal weakness of the “invincible” unnamed aggressors and the inherent power of the human values shard by the “conquered” people...read more

Product Description: Ten original essays by advanced scholars and well-published poets address the middle generation of American poets, including the familiar---Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman---and various important contemporaries: Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker...read more

Product Description: What happened in American drama in the years between the Depression and the conclusion of World War II? How did war make its impact on the theatre? More important, how was drama used during the war years to shape American beliefs and actions? Albert Wertheim’s Staging the War brings to light the important role played by the drama during what might arguably be called the most important decade in American history...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one of the leading poets of the twentieth century, continues to influence a wide range of poets writing today. However, an image persists of Stevens as an aesthete who was politically removed from his times and who also exhibited sexist and racist tendencies...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Why do we so often speak of books as living, flourishing, and dying? And what is at stake when we do so? This habit of treating books as people, or personifying texts, is rampant in postwar American culture. In this bracing study, Amy Hungerford argues that such personification has become pivotal to our contemporary understanding of both literature and genocide...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In Cold Fear: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character Pamela Hunt Steinle In Cold Fear examines the censorship controversies over J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye as a cultural debate occurring across America, 1954-present...read more

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A critical overview of the work features the writings of Nancy Chinn, William Heath, Elisabeth Herion-Sarafidis, Richard G. Law, Gideon Telpaz, and Janet M. Stanford.

Offers source documents and analysis to provide a historical context for understanding the major themes of 'A Separate Peace.' (view table of contents)

Collects twelve critical essays on Heller's classic novel of World War II, commenting on its structure and recurring themes, as well as the author's use of flashbacks.

Product Description: By showing that Joseph Heller was heavily influenced by the New Criticism and myth criticism that he studied in graduate school, this book discloses that Catch-22 is a faithful and inclusive retelling of the ancient epic of Gilgamesh, much as Joyce’s Ulysses famously recapitulates Homer’s Odyssey...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The glow of 1945 persists as a kind of beacon for American society, symbolic of an era when good and evil were easily defined. This image is at the center of Philip D. Beidler's entertaining look at the way World War II reshaped American popular culture...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Presenting the principles articulated in chaos theory as rewarding methods for examining literature, this volume examines the shift from modernism to postmodernism, dating the transition to the bombing of Hiroshima. The text also seeks to redefine anterior definitions of chaos and functions as an introduction to the fundamental tenets of choas theory...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Book by Stone, Albert E.

Product Description: Book by Cooper, Robert Floyd (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In March 1942, a desperate period for the allies in World War II, John Steinbeck published his propaganda novel The Moon is Down­—the story of ruthless invaders who overrun a militarily helpless country.  Throughout the novel, Steinbeck underscored both the fatal weakness of the “invincible” unnamed aggressors and the inherent power of the human values shard by the “conquered” people...read more