Nothing in the papers, not the most vivid and heart-rending descriptions, have made me realise war like your letters' Vera Brittain to Roland Leighton, 17 April 1915. This selection of letters, written between 1913 & 1918, between Vera Brittain and four young men - her fiance Roland Leighton, her brother Edward and their close friends Victor Richardson & Geoffrey Thurlow present a remarkable and profoundly moving portrait of five young people caught up in the cataclysm of total war. Roland, 'Monseigneur', is the 'leader' & his letters most clearly trace the path leading from idealism to disillusionment. Edward, ' Immaculate of the Trenches', was orderly & controlled, down even to his attire. Geoffrey, the 'non-militarist at heart' had not rushed to enlist but put aside his objections to the war for patriotism's sake. Victor on the other hand, possessed a very sweet character and was known as 'Father Confessor'. An important historical testimony telling a powerful story of idealism, disillusionment and personal tragedy.

"Excellent. This is a fine, and unusual, collection of literary Americana."--Atlantic "Fine comic moments of truth."--New York Times Book Review "An invaluable source of literary history."--Publishers Weekly This is the story of one of the most famous literary "sets" of the twentieth century. Gerald and Sara Murphy were at the center of a group including Ernest Hemingway and his wives, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Phillip Barry, and many others. They personified the jazz age and the lost generation. The Murphys have been viewed primarily as cult/pop figures. In this book Miller shows, through a sequential interweaving of letters from several correspondents, that they actually were the nucleus without which the group as we know it would not have stayed together. Miller allows the individual correspondents to tell their own stories, providing new insights into their lives and this era. It is the best sort of eavesdropping. Gerald and Sara Murphy married on December 30, 1915. Both families were moneyed and cosmopolitan. Their attraction to each other was in part based on their desire to escape the routine and predictable social rounds in which their families were immersed. Against their families' wishes, they and their three children left for Europe in 1921. They remained in France for over a decade, and quite naturally socialized with the expatriate set. They were, in part, models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night. MacLeish wrote poems about them, their friends paid tribute to them and relied on them day to day and in correspondence, and their own letters are worth reading for their liveliness and because they so well preserve a record of the twenties and thirties. Miller provides nearly every extant letter between the Murphys and their friends during those decades. Most of them have not been published previously, and of course, they have never been presented collectively. Together, they constitute an epistolary "novel" of peculiar power and authenticity about a remarkable era. Linda Patterson Miller is associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at Ogontz.

Members of the Lost Generation, American writers and artists who lived in Paris during the 1920s, continue to occupy an important place in our literary history. Rebelling against increased commercialism and the ebb of cosmopolitan society in early twentieth-century America, they rejected the culture of what Ernest Hemingway called a place of “broad lawns and narrow minds.” Much of what we know about these iconic literary figures comes from their own published letters and essays, revealing how adroitly they developed their own reputations by controlling the reception of their work. Surprisingly the literary world has paid less attention to their autobiographies. In Writing the Lost Generation, Craig Monk unlocks a series of neglected texts while reinvigorating our reading of more familiar ones. Well-known autobiographies by Malcolm Cowley, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein are joined here by works from a variety of lesser-known—but still important—expatriate American writers, including Sylvia Beach, Alfred Kreymborg, Samuel Putnam, and Harold Stearns. By bringing together the self-reflective works of the Lost Generation and probing the ways the writers portrayed themselves, Monk provides an exciting and comprehensive overview of modernist expatriates from the United States.

Noel Riley Fitch has written a perfect book, full to the brim with literary history, correct and whole-hearted both in statement and in implication. She makes me feel and remember a good many things that happened before and after my time. I'm glad to have lived long enough to read it. --Glenway Wescott

Founder of the Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare and Company and the first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, Sylvia Beach had a legendary facility for nurturing literary talent. In this first collection of her letters, we witness Beach's day-to-day dealings as bookseller and publisher to expatriate Paris. Friends and clients include Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Richard Wright. As librarian, publicist, publisher, and translator, Beach carved out a unique space for herself in English and French letters. This collection reveals Beach's charm and resourcefulness, sharing her negotiations with Marianne Moore to place Joyce's work in The Dial; her battle to curb the piracy of Ulysses in the United States; her struggle to keep Shakespeare and Company afloat during the Depression; and her complicated affair with the French bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier. These letters also recount Beach's childhood in New Jersey; her work in Serbia with the American Red Cross; her internment in a German prison camp; and her friendship with a new generation of expatriates in the 1950s and 1960s. Beach was the consummate American in Paris and a tireless champion of the avant-garde. Her warmth and wit made the Rue de l'Odéon the heart of modernist Paris.

This book is a detailed history of the German side of World War 2 . It based on 564 randomly selected private letters, two diaries and numerous documents. In all 72 different individuals are represented in the collection, from almost every branch of the military and German society. Collectively they tell a story that needs to be told.

The adventures and attitudes shared by the American writers dubbed "The Lost Generation" are brought to life here by one of the group's most notable members. Feeling alienated in the America of the 1920s, Fitzgerald, Crane, Hemingway, Wilder, Dos Passos, Crowley, and many other writers "escaped" to Europe, some forever, some as temporary exiles. As Cowley details in this intimate, anecdotal portrait, in renouncing traditional life and literature, they expanded the boundaries of art.

In 1998, Andrew Carroll founded the Legacy Project, with the goal of remembering Americans who have served their nation and preserving their letters for posterity. Since then, over 50,000 letters have poured in from around the country. Nearly two hundred of them comprise this amazing collection -- including never-before-published letters that appear in the new afterword. Here are letters from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf war, Somalia, and Bosnia -- dramatic eyewitness accounts from the front lines, poignant expressions of love for family and country, insightful reflections on the nature of warfare. Amid the voices of common soldiers, marines, airmen, sailors, nurses, journalists, spies, and chaplains are letters by such legendary figures as Gen. William T. Sherman, Clara Barton, Theodore Roosevelt, Ernie Pyle, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Julia Child, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, and Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. Collected in War Letters, they are an astonishing historical record, a powerful tribute to those who fought, and a celebration of the enduring power of letters.

How he could now be forgotten seems unfathomable. Lewis Galantie¿re guided Hemingway through his first years in Paris, when the author was unknown and desperate for recognition. He helped James Joyce and Sylvia Beach launch Ulysses; started John Houseman in his theatrical career; and saw Antoine de Saint-Exupe¿ry through his wartime exile in America, as his friend and as his collaborator and translator in life and in print. He was a playwright, a literary and cultural critic and an author, Federal Reserve Bank economist throughout the Great Depression, director of the French Branch of the Office of War Information at the onset of World War II, ACLU Director during the McCarthyism-fraught 1950s, Counselor to Radio Free Europe and, at a crucial time in its history, president of PEN America, the writers advocacy organization.Yet, today, few know his name and, to those who do, he is a cipher...And that was precisely his intent. The son of Jewish Latvian immigrants at a time of rampant anti-semitism, Lewis spent his first thirteen years in Chicago's tenements and did not complete grade school. Yet, by his early twenties, Lewis had convinced the world that he was the apostate son of French Catholic parents, and had earned degrees from French and German universities.Galantière, The Lost Generation¿s Forgotten Man, is both a historical chronicle providing rare insights into the lives of leading twentieth century figures (with previously unpublished personal correspondence from Hadley Hemingway and Alfred Knopf), and a meticulously researched biography. Galantière presents, for the first time, the seemingly magical story of the self-fabricated and fully-realized man, Lewis Galantie¿re.