About the Author
Sebastian Faulks worked as a journalist for 14 years before taking up writing books full time in 1991. He is the author of The Girl at the Lion D’Or, A Fool’s Alphabet, Birdsong, The Fatal Englishman, Charlotte Gray and On Green Dolphin Street. After a period in France, he and his family now live in London.
Jörg Hensgen was born in Germany and studied at the universities of Wuppertal, Gottingen and Hamburg. He now lives in London and works as a publisher’s editor.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ISAAC BABEL: ‘Treason’ from Collected Stories, translated by David McDuff from an annotated edition by Efram Sicher (Penguin Books, 1994), © David McDuff 1994, reprinted by permission of the publisher; PAT BARKER: from Regeneration (Viking, 1991), © Pat Barker 1991; reprinted by permission of the publisher; LOUIS BEGLEY: from Wartime Lies (Macmillan, 1991), © Louis Begley 1991; HEINRICH BOLL: from The Silent Angel, translated by Breon Mitchell (Andre Deutsch, 1994), © Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1992, English translation © Breon Mitchell 1994, reprinted by permission of Writer’s House, Inc. on behalf of the estate of the author; MARTIN BOOTH: from Hiroshima Joe (Hutchinson, 1985), © Martin Booth 1985, reprinted by permission of Gillon Aitken Associates on behalf of the author; ELIZABETH BOWEN: from The Heat of the Day (Jonathan Cape, 1949), © Elizabeth Bowen 1948, © renewed by Spencer Curtis and Graham Angus Watson, 1976, reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London, and Random House, Inc, New York; WILLIAM BOYD: from The New Confessions (Hamish Hamilton, 1987), © William Boyd 1987, reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd; KAY BOYLE: ‘Defeat’ from Modern Reading 10, edited by Reginald Moore (Wells Gardner, Darton & Co, 1943–46), reprinted by permission of the Estate of Kay Boyle and the Watkins/Loomis Agency; JOHN HORNE BURNS: from The Gallery (Secker & Warburg, 1948), © The Estate of John Home Burns 1947: ITALO CALVINO: from The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, revised by Martin McLaughlin (Jonathan Cape, 1998; originally published in Italy as Il entiero dei nidi di ragno), © Giulio Einaudi, Editore, Torino, original translation © William Collins & Sons Co Ltd 1956, revised translation © Martin McLaughlin 1998, reprinted by permission of Random House UK Ltd; PHILIP CAPUTO: from ‘In the Forest of the Laughing Elephant’ in Exiles: Three Short Novels (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), © Philip Caputo 1997, reprinted by permission of the publisher; LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE: from Journey to the End of the Night, translated by Ralph Manheim (Calder Publications, 1988; originally published in France as Voyage au bout de la nuit by Editions Gallimard, 1932), © Louis-Ferdinand Céline 1932, 1934, 1952, 1988, translation © Calder Publications Ltd 1983, 1988, 1997, reprinted by permission of The Calder Educational Trust; BRUCE CHATWIN: from On the Black Hill (Jonathan Cape, 1982), © Bruce Chatwin 1982, reprinted by permission of Random House UK Ltd and Gillon Aitken Associates; JEAN-LOUIS CURTIS: from The Forests of the Night (John Lehmann, 1950; originally published in France as Les Fôrets de la Nuit by René Juillard, 1948); LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES: from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Secker & Warburg, 1994), © Louis de Bernières 1994, reprinted by permission of Random House UK Ltd; SHUSAKU ENDO: from The Sea and the Poison, translated by Michael Gallagher (Peter Owen, 1972; originally published in Japan as Umi to Dokuyaku in 1957), © Bungei Shunju Co Ltd, Tokyo 1958, translation © Peter Owen Ltd 1972, reprinted by permission of Peter Owen Ltd, London; CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY: from My Favourite War (Granta Books, 1997), © Christopher John Farley 1996, reprinted by permission of the publisher; JOHN FOWLES: from The Magus (Jonathan Cape, 1966), © John Fowles 1966, 1977, reprinted by permission of Sheil Land Associates; A.D. GRISTWOOD: from The Somme (Jonathan Cape, 1927), reprinted by permission of Random House UK Ltd; ROBERT HARRIS: from Enigma (Hutchinson, 1995), © Robert Harris 1995, reprinted by permission of Random House UK Ltd; LARRY HEINEMANN: from Paco’s Story (Faber & Faber, 1987), © Larry Heinemann 1979, 1980, 1981, 1984, 1986, 1987; JOSEPH HELLER: from Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (Simon & Schuster, 1998), © Joseph Heller 1998, reprinted by permission of International Creative Management and Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc; ERNEST HEMINGWAY: from A Farewell to Arms (Jonathan Cape, 1929), © Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust, reprinted by permission of Random House UK Ltd and Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust; SEBASTIEN JAPRISOT: from A Very Long Engagement, translated by Linda Coverdale (The Harvill Press, 1993; originally published in France as Un long dimanche de françailles by Editions Denoël in 1991), © Editions Denoël 1991, English translation © Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc. and Harvill 1993, reprinted by permission of The Harvill Press; JAMES JONES: from The Thin Red Line (Hodder & Stoughton, 1998), © James Jones 1972, reprinted by permission of the publisher; CHRISTOPHER J. KOCH: from Highways to a War (William Heinemann, 1995), © Christopher J. Koch 1995, reprinted by permission of Random House UK Ltd; WOLFGANG KOEPPEN: from Death in Rome, translated by Michael Hoffman (Penguin Books, 1994; originally published in Germany as Der Tod in Rom in 1954), © Wolfgang Koeppen 1954, translation © Michael Hoffman 1992, reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd; LAURIE LEE: from A Moment of War (Viking, 1991), © Laurie Lee 1991, reprinted by permission of the publisher; ALISTAIR MACLEAN: from HMS Ulysses (Collins, 1955), copyright Devoran Trustees Ltd 1955; NORMAN MAILER: from The Naked and the Dead (Flamingo, 1993), (c) Norman Mailer 1949, reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd; DAVID MALOUF: from Fly Away Peter (Chatto & Windus, 1982), © David Malouf 1982, reprinted by permission of Random House UK Ltd; ANDRÉ MALRAUX: from Days of Hope, translated by Stuart Gilbert and Alastair MacDonald (Penguin Books, 1970; originally published in France as L’Espoir in 1938), © The Estate of André Malraux 1938, reprinted by permission of the publisher; STRATIS MYRIVILIS: from Life in the Tomb, translated by Peter Bien (Quartet Books, 1987), translation (c) The Trustees of Dartmouth College, reprinted by permission of Quartet Books Ltd and the University Press of New England; BAO NINH: from The Sorrow of War, English Version by Frank Palmos from the original translation by Phan Thanh Hao (Secker & Warburg, 1994; originally published as Thân Phân Cua Tinh Yên by Nhà Xuät Ban Hoi Nha Van (Writers’ Association Publishing House), Hanoi, 1991), English translation (c) Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1993, reprinted by permission of Random House UK Ltd; TIM O’BRIEN: ‘How to Tell A True War Story’ in The Things They Carried (HarperCollins, 1990), (c) Tim O’Brien 1990, reprinted by permission of the publisher; MICHAEL ONDAATJE: from The English Patient (Bloomsbury Publishing, 1992), (c) Michael Ondaatje 1992; ERICH MARIA REMARQUE: from All Quiet on the Western Front, translated by Brian Murdoch (Jonathan Cape, 1994; first published in Germany as Im Westen nichts Neues by Ullstein, 1929), (c) The Estate of the late Paulette Remarque 1929, translation (c) Jonathan Cape 1994, reprinted by permission of Random House UK Ltd; JAMES SALTER: from The Hunters, first published in Great Britain by The Harvill Press in 1998, (c) James Salter 1956 and 1997, reprinted by permission of The Harvill Press and Counterpoint Press, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.; SIEGFRIED SASSOON: ‘Finished with the War’, reprinted in Regeneration by Pat Barker (Viking, 1991), copyright Siegfried Sassoon; and from Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (Faber & Faber, 1930), copyright Siegfried Sassoon, reprinted by permission of George Sassoon; KURT VONNEGUT: ‘A City Mourned at Some Profit’ from Palm Sunday (Jonathan Cape, 1981), (c) The Ramjac Corporation 1981, reprinted by permission of Random House UK Ltd.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers would be pleased to rectify any omissions brought to their notice at the earliest opportunity.
ALSO BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS
The Girl at the Lion D’Or
A Fool’s Alphabet
Birdsong
The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives
Charlotte Gray
On Green Dolphin Street
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
This is a list of some of the titles we considered. In many cases we wanted to include extracts but found none sufficiently representative and/or self-contained.
First World War
ALDINGTON, RICHARD, Death of a Hero (London: Chatto & Windus 1929)
ALVERDES, PAUL, Changed Men (London: Martin Secker 1933)
BARBUSSE, HENRI, Under Fire (1916; trans. London: J.M. Dent 1917)
BARKER, PAT, Regeneration (London: Viking 1991)
BARKER, PAT, The Eye in the Door (London: Viking 1993)
BARKER, PAT, The Ghost Road (London: Viking 1995)
BARNES, JULIAN, ‘Evermore’, in: Cross Channel (London: Jonathan Cape 1996)
BOYD, WILLIAM, An Ice-Cream War (London: Hamish Hamilton 1982)
BOYD, WILLIAM, The New Confessions (London: Hamish Hamilton 1987)
BRIFFAULT, ROBERT, Europa (London: Robert Hale 1936)
BRIFFAULT, ROBERT, Europa in Limbo (London: Robert Hale 1937)
CÉLINE, LOUIS-FERDINAND, Journey to the End of the Night (1932; trans. London: John Calder 1988)
CHATWIN, BRUCE, On the Black Hill (London: Jonathan Cape 1982)
DOS PASSOS, JOHN, Three Soldiers (New York: Viking Penguin 1921)
EDRIC, ROBERT, In Desolate Heaven (London: Duckworth 1997)
FAULKNER, WILLIAM, Soldiers’ Pay (London: Chatto & Windus 1926)
FAULKNER, WILLIAM, ‘The Wasteland’ (comprising ‘Ad Astra’, ‘Victory’, ‘Crevasse’, ‘Turnabout’ and ‘All the Dead Pilots’), in Collected Stories (London: Chatto & Windus 1951)
FORD, FORD MADDOX, Parade’s End (London: The Bodley Head 1924–8)
GLAESER, ERNST, Class 1902 (1928; trans. London: Martin Secker 1929)
GRISTWOOD, A.D., The Somme, including also The Coward (London: Jonathan Cape 1927)
HAŠEK, JAROSLAV, The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–3; trans. London: William Heinemann 1973)
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST, ‘Soldier’s Home’, in In Our Time (London: Jonathan Cape 1926)
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST, A Farewell to Arms (London: Jonathan Cape 1929)
INGRAM, KENNETH, Out of Darkness (Chatto & Windus 1927)
JAPRISOT, SEBASTIEN, A Very Long Engagement (1991; trans. London: Harvill 1993)
JONES, DAVID, In Parenthesis (London: Faber and Faber 1937)
KEABLE, ROBERT, Simon Called Peter (London: Constable 1921)
MALOUF, DAVID, Fly Away Peter (London: Chatto & Windus 1982)
MANNING, FREDERIC, The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929; second edition: Her Privates We, London: Peter Davies 1930)
MAXWELL, W.B., We Forget Because We Must (London: Hutchinson 1928)
MYRIVILIS, STRATIS, Life in the Tomb (1924; trans. London: Quartet 1987)
O’FLAHERTY, LIAM, The Return of the Brute (London: Mandrake Press 1929)
READ, HERBERT, Ambush (London: Faber and Faber 1930)
RENN, LUDWIG, War (1928; trans. London: Martin Secker 1929)
REMARQUE, ERICH MARIA, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929; trans. 1929; new trans. London: Jonathan Cape 1994)
ROTH, JOSEPH, Flight Without End (1927; trans. London: Chatto & Windus 1983)
ROTH, JOSEPH, Tarabas (1935; trans. London: Chatto & Windus 1987)
ROUAUD, JEAN, Fields of Glory (1990; trans. London: Harvill 1994)
SASSOON, SIEGFRIED, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (London: Faber and Faber 1928)
SASSOON, SIEGFRIED, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (London: Faber and Faber 1930)
SOLZHENITSYN, ALEKSANDR, August 1914 (1971–83; trans. London: Jonathan Cape 1989)
SOLZHENITSYN, ALEKSANDR, November 1916 (1993; trans. London: Jonathan Cape 1999)
THOMPSON, EDWARD, In Araby Orion (London: Ernest Benn 1930)
THOMPSON, EDWARD, These Men Thy Friends (London: Macmillan 1933)
WELLS, H.G., Mr Britling Sees It Through (London: Cassell 1916)
WILLIAMSON, HENRY, How Dear Is Life (London: MacDonald 1954)
YEAYES, V.M., Winged Victory (London: Jonathan Cape 1934)
ZWEIG, ARNOLD, The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927; trans. New York: Viking Penguin 1928)
ZWEIG, ARNOLD, Education Before Verdun (1935; trans. London: Martin Secker 1936)
Russian Revolution and Civil War
BABEL, ISAAC, ‘Red Cavalry’, in: Collected Stories (1924–37; trans. 1955; new trans. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1994)
SHOLOKHOV, MIKHAIL, And Quiet Flows the Don (1929; trans. London: Putnam 1934)
Spanish Civil War
FURST, ALAN, Night Soldiers (London: The Bodley Head 1988)
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST, For Whom the Bell Tolls (London: Jonathan Cape 1941)
LEE, LAURIE, A Moment of War (London: Viking 1991)
MALRAUX, ANDRÉ, Days of Hope (1938; trans. London: Hamish Hamilton 1968)
SIMON, CLAUDE, The Palace (1962; trans. London: John Calder 1987)
Second World War
ANATOLI, A. (KUZNETSOV), Babi Yar (1966; trans. London: Jonathan Cape 1970)
BALLARD, J.G., Empire of the Sun (London: Victor Gollancz 1984)
DE BEAUVOIR, SIMONE, The Blood of Others (trans. 1944; London 1948)
BEGLEY, LOUIS, Wartime Lies (London: Picador 1991)
DE BERNIERES, LOUIS, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (London: Secker & Warburg 1994)
BINDING, TIM, Island Madness (London: Picador 1998)
BÖLL, HEINRICH, Group Portrait With Lady (1971; trans. London: Secker & Warburg 1973)
BÖLL, HEINRICH, A Soldier’s Legacy (1982; trans. London: Secker & Warburg 1985)
BÖLL, HEINRICH, The Silent Angel (1992; trans. London: André Deutsch 1994)
BÖLL, HEINRICH, The Stories of Heinrich Böll (trans. London: Secker & Warburg 1986)
BOOTH, MARTIN, Hiroshima Joe (London: Hutchinson 1985)
BOWEN, ELIZABETH, The Heat of the Day (London: Jonathan Cape 1949)
BUCHHEIM, LOTHAR-GÜNTHER, The Boat (1973; trans. London: HarperCollins 1975)
BURNS, JOHN HORNE, The Gallery (London: Secker & Warburg 1948)
BUZZATI, DINO, The Tartar Steppe (1945; trans. Manchester: Carcanet Press 1996)
CALVINO, ITALO, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947; trans. 1956; new trans. London: Jonathan Cape 1998)
CUNNINGHAM, PETER, Consequences of the Heart (London: Harvill 1998)
CURTIS, JEAN-LOUIS, The Forests of the Night (1947; trans. London: John Lehmann 1950)
VAN DIS, ADRIAAN, My Father’s War (1994; trans. New York: The Free Press 1996)
ENDO, SHUSAKU, The Sea and the Poison (1957; trans. London: Peter Owen 1972)
ENDO, SHUSAKU, Stained Glass Elegies (1979; trans. London: Peter Owen 1984)
FARRELL, J.G., The Singapore Grip (London: HarperCollins 1978)
FAULKNER, WILLIAM, ‘Two Soldiers’ and ‘Shall Not Perish’, in Collected Stories (London: Chatto & Windus 1951)
FOWLES, JOHN, The Magus (1966; revised London: Jonathan Cape 1977)
FULLER, JOHN, The Burning Boys (London: Chatto & Windus 1989)
FURST, ALAN, The Polish Officer (London: HarperCollins 1995)
FURST, ALAN, The World at Night (London: HarperCollins 1997)
GALLICO, PAUL, The Snow Goose (London: Michael Joseph 1941)
DEL GIUDICE, DANIELE, Take-Off (1994; trans. London: Harvill 1996)
GRASS, GÜNTER, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. London: Secker & Warburg 1962)
GRASS, GÜNTER, Dog Years (1963; trans. London: Secker & Warburg 1965)
GREEN, HENRY, Caught (London: Chatto & Windus 1943)
GREENE, GRAHAM, The Ministry of Fear (London: Jonathan Cape 1943)
GROSSMAN, VASILY, Life and Fate (1980; trans. London: Harvill 1985)
HARRIS, ROBERT, Enigma (London: Hutchinson 1995)
HELLER, JOSEPH, Catch-22 (London: Jonathan Cape 1962)
HELLER, JOSEPH, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (London: Simon & Schuster 1998)
HENDERSON, MEG, The Holy City (London: Flamingo 1997)
HERSEY, JOHN, The Call: An American Missionary in China (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1985)
HUGHES, DAVID, The Pork Butcher (London: Constable 1984)
JONES, JAMES, From Here to Eternity (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1952)
JONES, JAMES, The Thin Red Line (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1963)
KADARÉ, ISMAÏL, The General of the Dead Army (1970; trans. London: Quartet 1986)
KOEPPEN, WOLFGANG, Death in Rome (1954; trans. London: Hamish Hamilton 1992)
KOESTLER, ARTHUR, Arrival and Departure (London: Jonathan Cape 1943)
MACLEAN, ALISTAIR, HMS Ulysses (London: Collins 1955)
MAILER, NORMAN, The Naked and the Dead (London: Alan Wingate 1949)
MALAMUD, BERNARD, ‘Armistice’, in The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud (London: Vintage 1998)
MALOUF, DAVID, The Great World (London: Chatto & Windus 1990)
MANNING, OLIVIA, The Balkan Trilogy (London: William Heinemann 1987; comprising The Great Fortune, 1960; The Spoilt City, 1962; and Friends and Heroes, 1965)
MANNING, OLIVIA, The Levant Trilogy (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1982; comprising The Danger Tree, 1977; The Battle Lost and Won, 1978; and The Sum of Things, 1980)
MICHAELS, ANNE, Fugitive Pieces (London: Bloomsbury 1996)
MONSARRAT, NICHOLAS, The Cruel Sea (London: Cassell 1951)
MORANTE, ELSA, History: A Novel (trans. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974)
MULISCH, HARRY, The Assault (trans. New York: Pantheon 1985)
ONDAATJE, MICHAEL, The English Patient (London: Bloomsbury 1992)
PALMER, WILLIAM, The Pardon of Saint Anne (London: Jonathan Cape 1997)
PRITCHETT, v.s., ‘The Voice’, in The Lady from Guatemala: Selected Stories (London: Vintage 1997)
PYNCHON, THOMAS, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Jonathan Cape 1973)
SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL, Iron in the Soul (1949; trans. London: Hamish Hamilton 1950)
SHUTE, NEVIL, A Town Called Alice (London: William Heinemann 1950)
SIMON, CLAUDE, The Flanders Road (1960; trans. London: John Calder 1985)
SIMONOV, KONSTANTIN, Days and Nights (London: Hutchinson 1945)
SKVORECKY, JOSEF, The Engineer of Human Souls (1977; trans. London: Chatto & Windus 1984)
STEINBECK, JOHN, The Moon is Down (London: William Heinemann 1942)
STYRON, WILLIAM, Sophie’s Choice (London: Jonathan Cape 1979)
SZCZYPIORSKI, ANDRZEJ, The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman (1986; trans. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1990)
VIDAL, GORE, Williwaw (New York: Dutton 1948)
VONNEGUT, KURT, Slaughterhouse-Five (London: Jonathan Cape 1969)
VONNEGUT, KURT, ‘A Nazi City Mourned at Some Profit’, in: Palm Sunday; An Auto-biographical Collage (London: Jonathan Cape 1981)
WAUGH, EVELYN, The Sword of Honour Trilogy (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1984; comprising Men at Arms, 1952; Officers and Gentlemen, 1955; and Unconditional Surrender, 1961)
WOLF, CHRISTA, A Model Childhood (1976; trans. London: Virago 1983)
Korean War
SALTER, JAMES, The Hunters (1956; reissue London: Harvill 1998)
Vietnam War
CAPUTO, PHILIP, ‘In the Forest of the Laughing Elephant’, in: Exiles (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1998)
COETZEE, J.M., ‘The Vietnam Project’, in Dusklands (London: Secker & Warburg 1982)
FRENCH, ALBERT, Patches of Fire (London: Secker & Warburg 1997)
GREENE, GRAHAM, The Quiet American (London: William Heinemann 1955)
HASFORD, GUSTAV, The Short-Timers (New York: Harper & Row 1979)
HEINEMANN, LARRY, Paco’s Story (London: Faber and Faber 1986)
HEINEMANN, LARRY, Close Quarters (London: Faber and Faber 1987)
HOLLAND, WILLIAM E., Let a Soldier Die (London: Transworld 1985)
HUONG, DUONG THU, Novel Without a Name (trans. London: Picador 1995)
JONES, THOM, The Pugilist at Rest (London: Faber and Faber 1994)
KOCH, CHRISTOPHER J., Highways to a War (London: William Heinemann 1995)
MASON, BOBBIE ANN, In Country (London: Chatto & Windus 1986)
MASON, BOBBIE ANN, ‘Big Bertha Stories’, in Love Life (London: Chatto & Windus 1989)
NINH, BAO, The Sorrow of War (1991; trans. London: Secker & Warburg 1994)
O’BRIEN, TIM, Going After Cacciato (London: Jonathan Cape 1978)
O’BRIEN, TIM, The Things They Carried (London: Collins 1990)
OLEN BUTLER, ROBERT, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (London: Secker & Warburg 1993)
OLEN BUTLER, ROBERT, The Deep Green Sea (London: Secker & Warburg 1997)
DEL VECCHIO, JOHN M., The 13th Valley (London: Sphere Books 1983)
WEBB, JAMES, Fields of Fire (London: Granada 1980)
WOLFF, TOBIAS, ‘Soldier’s Joy’, in Back in the World (London: Jonathan Cape 1986)
Gulf War
BEINHART, LARRY, American Hero (London: Century 1994)
BLINN, JAMES, The Aardvark Is Ready For War (London: Doubleday 1997)
FARLEY, CHRISTOPHER JOHN, My Favourite War (London: Granta 1997)
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Isaac Babel was born in Odessa in 1894, the son of a Jewish tradesman. At the age of twenty-one he went to St Petersburg, where he had to avoid the Tsarist police because he lacked the residence certificate required of all Jews. Maxim Gorky was the first to encourage Babel by printing two of his stories in his magazine. During the First World War, Babel fought with the Tsarist army and in 1917 went over to the Bolsheviks.
In 1923 he returned to literature with a number of short stories printed in periodicals. An instant literary success, these formed the nucleus of the Odessa Stories, a group of vivid sketches of Russian Jewish life, and Red Cavalry (1926), written out of his experiences with Budyonny’s cavalry in the Polish campaign of 1920. Other stories, scenarios and plays followed. Unable to respond to the demands of political conformism that were being made on him, however, Babel was arrested suddenly in 1939. He died, possibly in 1941.
Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in 1943. She was educated at the London School of Economics and has been a teacher of history and politics. Her books include Union Street (1982), which has been filmed as Stanley and Iris; Blow Your House Down (1984); Liza’s England (1986), formerly The Century’s Daughter; The Man Who Wasn’t There (1989); Another World (1998); and her acclaimed Regeneration trilogy: Regeneration (1991), which was filmed in 1997, The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road, winner of the 1995 Booker Prize.
Louis Begley lives in New York City. He is the author of two novels, Wartime Lies and About Schmidt. Wartime Lies won the Pen Hemingway Foundation Award and the Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize.
Louis de Bernières is the author of The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (1990), Señor Viva and the Coca Lord (1991), The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992), and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994). He lives in London.
Heinrich Boll was born in Cologne in 1917 and brought up in a liberal Catholic pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prisoner-of-war camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his experiences as a soldier. His first novel, The Train Was on Time, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of postwar German writers. In 1972 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-Past Nine, The Clown, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and Group Portrait with Lady. He is also famous as a writer of short stories. Böll served for several years as president of the International PEN and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in July 1985.
Martin Booth is a poet, novelist and critic. His novels include Black Chameleon, The Jade Pavilion, Hiroshima Joe, Dreaming of Samarkand and, most recently, The Industry of Souls, which was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize.
Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner, and was educated at Downe House School in Kent. She travelled a good deal, dividing most of her time between London and her family home in County Cork.
Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, appeared in 1923, followed by another, Ann Lee’s, in 1926. The Hotel (1927) was her first novel, and was followed by The Last September (1929), Joining Charles (1929), another book of short stories, Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The Cat Jumps (short stories, 1934), The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), Look at All the Roses (short stories, 1941), The Demon Lover (short stories, 1945), The Heat of the Day (1949), Collected Impressions (essays, 1950), The Shelbourne (1951), A World of Love (1955), A Time in Rome (1960), Afterthought (essays, 1962), The Little Girls (1964), A Day in the Dark (1965), and her last book, Eva Trout (1969).
She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1949 and from Oxford University in 1956. In the same year she was appointed Lacy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College in the United States. In 1965 she was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.
William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and was brought up there and in Nigeria. He was educated at Gordonstoun School and at the universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. Between 1980 and 1983 he was a lecturer in English literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.
His novels include A Good Man in Africa (1981), An Ice-Cream War (1982), Stars and Bars (1984), The New Confessions (1987), Brazzaville Beach (1990), The Blue Afternoon (1993) and Armadillo (1998). Eight of his screenplays have been filmed, including A Good Man in Africa, based on his first novel. William Boyd lives in London.
Kay Boyle (1903–1992) was a novelist, short-story writer and poet. Born in Minnesota, her expatriate years in France before her return to the United States in 1941 provided her with much of the material for her fiction. Her novels include Gentlemen, I Address You Privately (1933), Primer for Combat (1942), A Frenchman Must Die (1946), Generation Without Farewell (1960) and The Underground Woman (1974).
John Home Burns was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1916. He was educated at Harvard and for five years worked as an English teacher in Connecticut. In 1942 he was drafted, and spent the war as an intelligence officer in North Africa and Italy, reading prisoner-of-war mail.
After the war he returned to America and to teaching for a year. In 1947 his first novel, The Gallery – loosely based on the author’s wartime experience in Naples – was published to great critical acclaim. The success of The Gallery immediately established John Home Burns’s reputation, and he abandoned teaching to become a full-time writer. He wrote two other novels, Lucifer with a Book (1949) and A Cry of Freedom (1951). In 1949 he left America and settled in Italy, where he died in 1953 at the age of thirty-seven. At the time of his death he was working on a novel based on the life of St Francis of Assisi.
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He was an essayist and a journalist, and among his best-known works of fiction are Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. He died in 1985.
Philip Caputo served with the Marines in Vietnam. After mustering out in 1967, he went on to a prize-winning career as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune, covering the war in Beirut and the fall of Saigon. In 1975 he was wounded in Beirut and, during his convalescence, completed the manuscript for A Rumor of War, his acclaimed Vietnam memoir. In 1977 he left the Tribune to devote himself to writing full-time. His novels are Horn of Africa, DelCorso’s Gallery, Indian Country and Equation for Evil. He is also the author of a collection of novellas, Exiles, and a second volume of memoir, Means of Escape.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, born in 1894, was one of the most controversial French writers of the century. Journey to the End of the Night, first published in 1932, became an instant bestseller and was followed by a string of other books, all based on the experience of his own life, written in the vernacular of his day and with a frankness of description that is still remarkable today.
His descriptions of war and poverty would seem to come from a man on the Left, but he was to turn to the Right after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1936. He became a rabid anti-Semite and a supporter of the German occupation of France. He was sentenced to death in absentia in 1945 and escaped to Denmark where he lived under police guard until 1951. Pardoned in 1952 he returned to Paris where he died in 1961.
Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield in 1940. After attending Marlborough College he began work as a porter at Sotheby’s. Eight years later, having become one of Sotheby’s youngest directors, he abandoned his job to pursue his passion for world travel. Between 1972 and 1975 he worked for the Sunday Times, before announcing his departure in a telegram: ‘Gone to Patagonia for six months.’
This trip inspired the first of Chatwin’s books, In Patagonia. Two of his books have been made into feature films: The Viceroy of Ouidah (retitled Cobra Verde), directed by Werner Herzog, and the British Film Institute’s On the Black Hill. On publication The Songlines went straight to No. 1 in the Sunday Times bestseller list and stayed in the top ten for nine months. His novel, Utz, was shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize. He died in January 1989.
Jean-Louis Curtis was born in 1917 at Orthez in the Basses-Pyrenees. He was educated at a local college and the Sorbonne in Paris. Afterwards he spent a considerable time in England, where he made a particular study of the works of Huxley.
As Professor of English at Bayonne he wrote his first novel Alceste Pas Perdu (1943), followed by Les Jeunes Hommes (1945) which was awarded the Prix Cazes.
During 1944–5 he joined the Pyrenean Corps Franc, and as a member of the Army he later fought in Alsace and Germany and spent some time in Württemberg and in the Palatinate with the occupation forces. Siegfried was the result of this experience, published in 1946. The Forests of the Night was first published in France in 1947. His other novels include Les justes causes (1954), La parade (1960), Un jeune couple (1967) and L’étage noble (1978).
Shusaku Endo was born in Tokyo in 1923. He graduated in French Literature from Keio University, then studied for several years in Lyons on a scholarship from the French government.
Widely regarded as the leading writer in Japan, he has won a series of outstanding literary awards and his work has been translated into seventeen languages. His books include The Samurai, The Sea and the Poison and Stained Glass Elegies.
Christopher John Farley has worked as a journalist for the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and USA Today. He is a staff writer for Time magazine where he reports on national affairs and popular culture. Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1966, he was raised in upstate New York. My Favourite War is his first novel.
John Fowles is the author of The Collector (1963), The Aristos (1964), The Magus (1966), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982) and A Maggot (1985). He lives in Dorset.
A.D. Gristwood was born in Catford, south London in 1893. He volunteered in the summer of 1915 and served as Rifleman 302064, 2/5th London Rifle Brigade in France, where he was wounded twice. Encouraged by H.G. Wells, he wrote The Somme which was published in 1927. He died in 1933 as a result of his war injuries.
Robert Harris was a reporter on the BBC’s Panorama and Newsnight programmes before becoming Political Editor of the Observer in 1987, and then a columnist on the Sunday Times. His five non-fiction books include Selling Hitler (1986), an account of the forging of Hitler’s diaries. His first novel, Fatherland (1992), was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize, and was followed by Enigma (1995) and Archangel (1998).
Larry Heinemann was born in 1944 in Chicago, where he now lives with his wife and two children. In 1966 he was inducted into the army and served a tour of duty with the 25th Division in Vietnam as a combat infantryman. He is the author of two novels, Close Quarters (1977) and Paco’s Story (1986).
Joseph Heller was born in 1923 in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a bombardier in the Second World War, afterwards attending the colleges of New York University and Columbia University and then Oxford, the last on a Fulbright scholarship. He then taught for two years at Pennsylvania State University before returning to New York, where he began a successful career in advertising. It was during this time that he had the idea for Catch-22. Working on the novel in spare moments and evenings at home, it took him eight years to complete and was first published in 1961.
Heller’s second novel, Something Happened, was published in 1974, and was followed by Good as Gold (1979), God Knows (1984) and Closing Time (1994). His memoir, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, was published in 1998.
Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899. His father was a doctor and he was the second of six children. Their home was at Oak Park, a Chicago suburb.
In 1917 Hemingway joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year he volunteered to work as an ambulance driver on the Italian front where he was badly wounded but twice decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919 and married in 1921. In 1922 he reported on the Greco-Turkish war, then two years later resigned from journalism to devote himself to fiction and settled in Paris.
Hemingway’s first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time, but it was the satirical novel, The Torrents of Spring, which established his name more widely. His international reputation was firmly secured by his next three books: Fiesta, Men Without Women and A Farewell to Arms. He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing, and his writing reflected this. He visited Spain during the Civil War and described his experience in the bestseller, For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. Ernest Hemingway died in 1961.
Sebastien Japrisot was born in Marseilles and was already a published writer at the age of seventeen. He received early recognition as a crime novelist, and is now one of France’s most popular writers. His novels have all been made into motion pictures, and he has himself written several screenplays.
In Great Britain he built up a reputation with his crime stories, among them The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun and The 10.30 from Marseilles. Japrisot won the Prix Interallié with A Very Long Engagement.
James Jones was born in Robinson, Illinois, in 1922. He joined the army in 1939, rose to the rank of sergeant, and won a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He was discharged from the army in 1944 and went on to study at the University of New York.
His first novel, From Here to Eternity, was published in 1951 and became an instant bestseller. His other novels include Some Came Running (1957), The Pistol (1959), The Thin Red Line (1962), Go to the Widow Maker (1967), The Merry Month of May (1971) and A Touch of Danger (1973). James Jones died in 1977.
Christopher J. Koch was born and educated in Tasmania. For a good deal of his life, he was a broadcasting producer. He worked for UNESCO in Indonesia, and has travelled extensively in Asia.
Koch has been a full-time writer since 1972. He is the author of five novels – The Boys in the Island, Across the Sea Wall, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Doubleman and Highways to a War – and one collection of essays, Crossing the Gap. The screenplay of The Year of Living Dangerously, co-written by Koch, was nominated for an Academy Award. He now lives in Sydney.
Wolfgang Koeppen was born in 1906 in Greifswald on the Baltic Coast. He had a career as a writer and journalist in Berlin before the Second World War, but his reputation is based essentially on the trilogy of novels he published shortly after it: Pigeons in the Grass (1951), The Hothouse (1953) and Death in Rome (1954). These books remain unequalled in postwar German fiction for their combination of stylistic innovation and trenchant political criticism. Subsequently, Koeppen has published travel books and a short memoir of his childhood, but no further fiction. He lives in Munich.
Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, and educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War – to which he later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as described in his book As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.
He published five books of poems: The Sun My Monument (1944); The Bloom of Candles (1947); My Many-Coated Man (1955), Pocket Poems (1960); and Selected Poems (1983). His other works include a verse play for radio, The Voyage of Magellan (1948); a record of his travels in Andalusia, A Rose for Winter (1955); The Firstborn (1964); a collection of his occasional writing, I Can’t Stay Long (1975); Two Women (1983); and three bestselling volumes of autobiography, Cider with Rosie (1959), which has sold over five million copies worldwide, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), and A Moment of War (1991), now published together in one volume as Red Sky at Sunrise (1992). Laurie Lee died in 1998.
Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots Minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy; two and a half years spent aboard a cruiser were later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel. He went on to write twenty-nine bestselling novels, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Force 10 from Navarone, Where Eagles Dare and Bear Island. He died in 1987.
Norman Mailer was born in New Jersey in 1923. He grew up in Brooklyn and entered Harvard University to study engineering when he was only sixteen. During the Second World War, Mailer served in the Philippines, an experience which formed the basis of his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead.
A major figure in postwar American literature, his other works include Barbary Shore, The Deer Park, Advertisements for Myself (for which he was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award), Ancient Evenings, Harlot’s Ghost and, most recently, The Gospel According to the Son.
David Malouf is recognized as one of Australia’s finest writers. His novels include Johnno, An Imaginary Life, Harland’s Half Acre, The Great World, Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek. He has also written five collections of poetry and three opera libretti. He lives in Sydney.
André Malraux was born in France in 1901 and educated in Paris where he studied archaeology and orientalism. His first visit to Asia was in 1923, when he became involved in revolutionary activities in China. The visit resulted in his book Les Conquérants (1928). This was followed by La Voie royale (1930) and La Condition humaine (1933), which won the Prix Goncourt.
In the middle and late 1930s Malraux became one of France’s leading anti-Fascists, and organized a volunteer air squadron to fight for the Republicans in Spain. His novel dealing with the early part of the war in Spain, Days of Hope (1938), was written close to the events.
After a distinguished career in the Second World War, Malraux became involved in the Gaullist movement. He was Minister of Information from 1945-6 and became Minister of State at the inception of the Fifth Republic in 1959. After de Gaulle’s withdrawal from politics in 1969, Malraux continued to be active both in the intellectual and the international fronts. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford, an Officier de la Légion d’Honneur and a Compagnon de la Libération. Malraux died in 1976.
Stratis Myrivilis was born in Sykamia, Lesbos in 1892. He wrote his first novel, Life in a Tomb, in journal form as a sergeant in the trenches of the Macedonian front. It became one of the most successful and widely read works of fiction in Greece since its publication in serial form in 1923–4, despite its inclusion on the list of censored books under both Metaxas and the German occupation. It is the first volume in a trilogy containing The Mermaid Madonna and The Schoolmistress with the Golden Eyes.
A prolific author, Myrivilis was also an active journalist and broadcaster, being General Programme Director for the Greek National Broadcasting Institute from 1936 to 1951 (excluding the period of German occupation, when he was dismissed because of a broadcast he gave calling on Greeks to resist). After the war he was elected President of the National Society of Greek Writers. He died in 1969.
Bao Ninh was born in Hanoi in 1952. During the Vietnam War he served in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred who went to war with the brigade in 1969, he is one of the ten who survived. A huge bestseller in Vietnam, The Sorrow of War is his first novel.
Tim O’Brien served as an infantryman in Vietnam and later worked as a national affairs reporter for the Washington Post. Born in Minnesota, he now lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
When If I Die in a Combat Zone, his first book, was published in 1973, it established him as one of the leading American writers of his generation, a status that was confirmed when his novel Going After Cacciato won the 1979 National Book Award. His other books include The Things They Carried (1990), In the Lake of the Woods (1994) and Tomcat in Love (1999).
Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Toronto. His books include Coming Through Slaughter, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, The Cinnamon Peeler, Running in the Family, In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient.
Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück in 1898. Exiled from Nazi Germany, and deprived of his citizenship, he lived in America and Switzerland. His novels include All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back, Three Comrades, The Sparkling of Life and A Time to Love and a Time to Die. Remarque died in 1970.
James Salter was born in New Jersey in 1925. He is the author of The Hunters (1957), The Arm of Flesh (1961), A Sport and a Pastime (1967), Light Years (1975), Solo Faces (1981), Dusk and Other Stories (1988) and his memoirs, Burning the Days (1997). He won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1989.
Siegfried Sassoon was born at Brenchley, Kent, in 1886. He was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Clare College, Cambridge. After university, he lived at home and wrote poems which were privately printed.
He enlisted at the outbreak of the First World War and was sent to France as a second lieutenant where he won the Military Cross. In 1917 he threw his MC into the Mersey and publicly announced his refusal to go back to the front. He expected to be court-martialled but was sent to Craiglockart Hospital near Edinburgh, thanks to the intervention of his friend Robert Graves. There he befriended and encouraged the poet Wilfred Owen, before returning to his regiment, with whom he served in Palestine and France until July 1918.
His attitude towards the war found fierce expression in his poetry, including the collections Counterattack (1918) and Satirical Poems (1926). His fiction includes the autobiographical trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, containing Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston’s Progress (1936). He was awarded the CBE in 1951 and the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 1957. Sassoon died in Heytesbury, Wiltshire, in 1967.
Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second World War he served in Europe and, as a prisoner of war in Germany, witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He is the author of fourteen other novels, most recently Timequake, a collection of stories and three non-fiction books. He lives in New York City.
Bruce Chatwin
VOLUNTEERS
When the First World War broke out in August 1914, both the volunteers who marched through the streets of Paris, London and Berlin, and the crowds who cheered them believed that the war would be over by Christmas. The ‘Spirit of 1914’ was still powerful four months later when the war reached the small Welsh village of Rhulen, as described here by Bruce Chatwin in his novel On the Black Hill (1982).
THEN THE WAR came.
For years, the tradesmen in Rhulen had said there was going to be war with Germany, though nobody knew what war would mean. There had been no real war since Waterloo, and everyone agreed that with railways and modern guns this war would either be very terrible, or over very quickly.
On the 7th of August 1914, Amos Jones and his sons were scything thistles when a man called over the hedge that the Germans had marched into Belgium, and rejected England’s ultimatum. A recruiting office, he said, had opened in the Town Hall. About twenty local lads had joined.
‘More fool them,’ Amos shrugged, and glared downhill into Herefordshire.
All three went on with their scything, but the boys looked very jittery when they came in for supper.
Mary had been pickling beetroot, and her apron was streaked with purple stains.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You’re far too young to fight. Besides, it’ll probably be over by Christmas.’
Winter came, and there was no end to the war. Mr Gomer Davies started preaching patriotic sermons and, one Friday, sent word to The Vision, bidding them to a lantern lecture, at five o’clock, in the Congregation Hall.
The sky was deepening from crimson to gunmetal. Two limousines were parked in the lane; and a crowd of farm boys, all in their Sunday best, were chatting to the chauffeurs or peering through the windows at the fur rugs and leather upholstery. The boys had never seen such automobiles at close quarters. In a nearby shed, an electric generator was purring.
Mr Gomer Davies stood in the vestibule, welcoming all comers with a handshake and muddy smile. The war, he said, was a Crusade for Christ.
Inside the Hall, a coke stove was burning and the windows had misted up. A line of electric bulbs spread a film of yellow light over the planked and varnished walls. There were plenty of Union Jacks strung up, and a picture of Lord Kitchener.
The magic lantern stood in the middle of the aisle. A white sheet had been tacked up to serve as a screen; and a khaki-clad Major, one arm in a sling, was confiding his box of glass slides to the lady projectionist.
Veiled in cigar smoke, the principal speaker, Colonel Bickerton, had already taken his seat on the stage and was having a jaw with a Boer War veteran. He extended his game leg to the audience. A silk hat sat on the green baize tablecloth, beside a water-carafe and a tumbler.
Various ministers of God – all of whom had sunk their differences in a blaze of patriotism – went up to pay their respects to the squire, and show concern for his comfort.