The Greatest War Novels
Explore the greatest war novels of all time, from timeless classics to modern masterpieces. Discover powerful stories of courage, conflict, and humanity in our curated list of must-read war literature.
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All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
The masterpiece of the German experience during World War I, considered by many the greatest war novel of all time—with an Oscar–winning film adaptation now streaming on Netflix. “[Erich Maria Remarque] is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank.”—The New York Times Book Review I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. . . . This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army during World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another . . . if only he can come out of the war alive.
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And Quiet Flows the Don
by Mikhail Sholokhov
WINNER OF NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE, 1965 WINNER OF THE STALIN PRIZE, 1941 Mikhail Sholokhov’s groundbreaking epic novel gives a sweeping depiction of Russian life and culture in the early 20th century. In the same vein as War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, And Quiet Flows the Don gives readers a glimpse into many aspects of Russian culture, and the choices a country makes when faced with war and destruction. In his enormous epic of Cossack life during the Revolution...Mikhail Sholokhov has achieved even greater power, sustained narrative gift and stirring human truthfulness.”—New York Times “In addition to its panoramic grandeur, the wealth of its characters and its historic realism, Sholokhov's book is memorable for its portrayal of the primitive and already almost legendary life of the Don Cossacks.”—Malcolm Cowley, New Republic
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The Red Badge of Courage
by Stephen Crane
The classic story of a sensitive boy under the strain of war moving from cowardice to courage.
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War and Peace
by graf Leo Tolstoy
Presents the classical epic of the Napoleonic Wars and their effects on four Russian families
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
A book about love and courage and decency and glory. It is written with a wisdom that washes the mind and cools it. With an understanding that rips the heart with compassion.
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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel of love during wartime. Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield, this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep. Hemingway famously rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right. A classic novel of love during wartime, “A Farewell to Arms stands, more than eighty years after its first appearance, as a towering ornament of American literature” (The Washington Times).
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The Thin Red Line
by James Jones
They are the men of C-for-Charlie company—“Mad” 1st Sgt. Eddie Welsh, Pvt. 1st Class Don Doll, Pvt. John Bell, Capt. James Stein, Cpl. Fife, and dozens more just like them—infantrymen who are about to land, grim and white-faced, on an atoll in the Pacific called Guadalcanal. This is their story, a shatteringly realistic walk into hell and back. In the days ahead, some will earn medals, others will do anything they can dream up to get evacuated before they land in a muddy grave. But they will all discover the thin red line that divides the sane from the mad—and the living from the dead—in this unforgettable portrait that captures for all time the total experience of men at war. Foreword by Francine Prose “Brutal, direct, and powerful . . . The men are real, the words are real, death is real, imminent and immediate.”—Los Angeles Times “A rare and splendid accomplishment . . . strong and ambitious, spacious, and as honest as any novel ever written.”— Newsweek “[A] major novel of combat in World War II . . . reminiscent of Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage.”—The Christian Science Monitor “The Thin Red Line moves so intensely and inexorably that it almost seems like the war it is describing.”—The New York Times Book Review
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Ivanhoe
by Walter Scott
The great historical romance by Sir Walter Scott giving reality to twelfth-century England. The story of the disinherited Knight Ivanhoe and the fair Lady Rowena.
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Quo Vadis
by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) won the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature. A brilliant Polish writer and patriot, he is possibly best known abroad for his monumental historical epic Quo Vadis that portrays the vibrant and dissonant combination of cruel excesses and decadence of Rome during the reign of the corrupt Emperor Nero and the high faith of the emerging era of early Christianity. Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero, is a love story of Marcus Vinicius, a passionate young Roman tribune, and Lygia Callina, a beautiful and gentle Christian maiden of royal Lygian descent and a hostage of Rome, raised in a patrician home. At first Marcus, a typical aristocratic Roman libertine of his time, has no notion of love and merely desires Lygia with erotic animalistic intensity. Through political machinations of the elegant Petronius he contrives to have her taken by force from her foster home and into the decadent and terrible splendor of the court of Ceasar, setting in motion a course of events that culminate in his own spiritual redemption. Intricately researched, populated with vibrant historical figures, and gorgeous period detail, bloody spectacle and intimate beauty, this is an epic tapestry of the triumph of love, faith and sacrifice.
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