ABSTRACT
One fact of war is that wars produce literature. From Homer's Iliad to Walt Whitman's Civil War poems to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, war and literature are each a subset of the other. And as soldiers have increasingly become more literate, the twentieth century has seen a marked increase in the body of literature written by soldiers and veterans themselves. No longer does war await a Homer or a Tennyson or a Kipling to be translated into literature, but rather the Siegfried Sassoons and James Joneses and Robert Butlers speak for themselves, making use of creative imagination to be sure, but fueling it with the raw stuff of experience.
