I’m delighted to announce that Algora Publishing has agreed to publish my second book, Pen & Sword: Writers Who Fight.
Algora (“Nonfiction for the Nonplussed”) is a serious-minded NYC publishing house, as is immediately evident when viewing its Web site. I’m very grateful to Martin DeMers for this opportunity to continue my writing career at a challenging level. I look forward to presenting this little-known intersection of military history and literary biography in Algora’s catalog.
Literature of the sea and nautical writers like Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and Jack London always entranced me. However, as I’ve grown older and increasingly begun thinking of myself not so much as an ex-sailor but as a veteran, I’ve become interested in famed authors who served in the military, in whatever branch, for whatever country.
I’ve drawn a distinction between writers who went to war as, say, ambulance drivers (e.g. Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos), journalists (e.g. Stephen Crane), or nurses (e.g. Walt Whitman) versus bona fide military men: in other words, REAL soldiers who — it just so happened — were great writers. This (admittedly subjective) list has undergone several phases as I’ve continued to think about the subject.
An outgrowth of articles published in Military History magazine and elsewhere, this book is about nine such individuals:
- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), who lost the use of his left arm as a Spanish soldier fighting the Turks in the famed Battle of Lepanto
- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), who served four years as a gunnery officer in the Russian Army and saw fighting in both Chechnya and Crimea
- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), who saw hard action during the American Civil War
- Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), who served as a field doctor for the British in South Africa during the Boer War
- Wilfred Owen (1893-1917), a British poet killed in the trenches of France just one week before the end of WWI
- Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), Owen’s friend and fellow poet, who managed to survive the war
- Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), who enlisted with the Canadian army during WWI and was seriously concussed by German shelling
- George Orwell (1903-50), who fought with the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War
- Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), who was a German prisoner of war after being captured in WWII’s Battle of the Bulge.
With this book, I’m moving back into more familiar territory with respect to my own professional background and education. This isn’t so much military history per se, but something perhaps best described as “literary nonfiction.” Among other things, I hope to demonstrate that beyond learning some very interesting and little-known elements of these men’s biographies, studying their military experiences leads one to read with new eyes such works as Don Quixote, War and Peace, and Animal Farm.
In a larger sense, I hope to deconstruct (at least a little) the classic either/or dichotomy between the Man of Thought and the Man of Action, hoping to demonstrate that these attributes, even at the highest imaginable level, are not and need not be mutually exclusive.
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