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The War Lover

A Novel

Author John Hersey
Ebook
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Sep 04, 2019 | 416 Pages | 9780593080887
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In the immediate sense, this long, eventful and agonizingly suspenseful novel shows what fear, secret hidden fear, can do to even one of those seeming heroes, a war lover. In the longer view, however, this may come to be regarded as the great and ultimate anti-war novel of our time.
            The scene is an American bomber base in England sometime before D-Day. The characters are the crew of a Flying Fortress named The Body, particularly the pilot, Buzz Marrow, and the co-pilot, Boman, who tells the story of his worship of Marrow, and of how his hero succumbed, on their final crucial mission, to the fatal weakness with which he camouflaged his fear—his secret delight in annihilation. 
            Boman also tells the story of the English girl he loved (and Mr. Hersey’s many admirers will note a new tenderness and passion in these scenes), and of her fateful intervention in Marrow’s collapse. Both narrative lines flow together and are superbly united in the sustained and powerful climax.
John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947, he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993. View titles by John Hersey

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In the immediate sense, this long, eventful and agonizingly suspenseful novel shows what fear, secret hidden fear, can do to even one of those seeming heroes, a war lover. In the longer view, however, this may come to be regarded as the great and ultimate anti-war novel of our time.
            The scene is an American bomber base in England sometime before D-Day. The characters are the crew of a Flying Fortress named The Body, particularly the pilot, Buzz Marrow, and the co-pilot, Boman, who tells the story of his worship of Marrow, and of how his hero succumbed, on their final crucial mission, to the fatal weakness with which he camouflaged his fear—his secret delight in annihilation. 
            Boman also tells the story of the English girl he loved (and Mr. Hersey’s many admirers will note a new tenderness and passion in these scenes), and of her fateful intervention in Marrow’s collapse. Both narrative lines flow together and are superbly united in the sustained and powerful climax.

Author

John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947, he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993. View titles by John Hersey

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