Literature and War

From the time of the Iliad, warfare has been one of the key literary themes of Western culture. American war literature both reflects and challenges American attitudes toward war, nationality, violence, and gender, particularly manhood.

Despite war's importance as a literary subject, very little literature about war has endured from the first hundred years after the American Revolution. Americans did not even begin to establish a distinctive literary culture until the decades before the Civil War. American war literature has, in large part, reflected the Romantic resistance to the machine age, extending the tradition of such writers as Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. The major writers of this time period, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Henry James, were more interested in themes of guilt and innocence, exploring the various forms of violence between members of a society rather than violence resulting from armed conflicts. By the end of the 19th century, this emphasis had begun to change, partly as a result of the disappearance of the frontier, the greater involvement of the United States in foreign wars, and the rise of the military as a separate establishment. Important works that exemplify this shift include Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Herman Melville's Billy Budd (written c. 1888, published 1924), and Ambrose Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891). Since 1895, when Crane proved that military experience was not a prerequisite for writing successfully about war, the theme of warfare has drawn the attention of major novelists to the extent that, one might argue, it has become a literary rite of passage. Since the 1950s, the subject of war has attracted novelists not only as a permanent feature of technological society but also as a powerful metaphor for life in the 20th century.

The subject of war has been less attractive to poets in the United States. For example, U.S. poets produced no concentration of high-quality poetry in reaction to any particular war that compares with what British poets produced about World War I. Although poets have written in response to every major U.S. conflict, very little of their work, with the exception of the best poetry of the Civil War, has been anthologized regularly.

American war literature reflects attitudes toward armed conflict and toward the military establishment that are in many ways unique. Beginning with colonial resentment of British forces, Americans have always been suspicious of [Page 423]large standing armies and strong central governments. The dominant ideology that informed the early republic valorized the citizen–soldier over hired regulars, a man who took up arms for patriotic reasons rather than for pay. Despite a seeming lack of interest in maintaining war readiness, however, Americans have frequently been aggressive and quick to successfully mobilize and commit to war. Traditionally, Americans have expanded and contracted the Army according to their needs, mobilizing sporadically, and often with the spirit of sudden intense crusades.

Americans, until recently, have correspondingly lacked a military caste or tradition of military honor. The United States was, until the mid-20th century, one of the few Western societies in which the officer class was not a well-regarded part of the social fabric. It is hardly surprising, then, that the enlisted man has been the muse of American war novelists and poets, while European writers have preferred to focus more on the officer class. American authors have generally espoused soldierly virtues, but impugned the military establishment.

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