Since Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has brazenly re-enacted what Adolph Hitler did to Czechoslovakia and Poland in "the long 1939," this new book could hardly be more timely.
Mining the borderlands where history meets literature, James Heffernan shows how the imminence and outbreak of World War II ignited the imaginations of writers ranging from Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, and W.H. Auden to Bertolt Brecht, Evelyn Waugh, Irène Némirovsky, and Henry Green, whose novel Caught vividly re-creates his own experience as an auxiliary fireman in the London Blitz.
Graham Greene once called Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls "more truthful than history." Whether or not Greene was right, this book steadily compares historical narratives of the long 1939 with re-creations of its major events in works of literature written well before anyone knew how the war would end. In doing so, it aims to show just how much the truths of literature can rival those of history.
PRE-PUBLICATION COMMENTS
A videotaped interview with James Heffernan:
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