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A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings

The Road Back to Paris | Mollie and Other War Pieces | Normandy Revisited | uncollected war journalism More

Edited by Pete Hamill

“The war brought out the best in [Liebling]. Here he . . . relied on straightforward observation, delivered in a style less mannered than Hemingway’s, less sentimental than Ernie Pyle’s, less excitable than Michael Herr’s. It’s the kind of writing that looks easy, except that very few war correspondents have ever done it so well.”
— Charles McGrath, The New York Times

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

News “One More Beach to Cross”: Reliving D-Day through the Eyes of Those Who Were There
June 6, 2024

Interviews Pete Hamill on A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings
August 7, 2020

Interviews Rick Atkinson on Cornelius Ryan’s “vivid, visceral, riveting” histories of World War II
July 1, 2019

One of the most gifted and influential American journalists of the 20th century, A. J. Liebling spent five years reporting the dramatic events and myriad individual stories of World War II. As a correspondent for The New Yorker, Liebling wrote with a passionate commitment to Allied victory, an unfailing attention to telling details, and an appreciation for the literary challenges presented by the “discursive, centrifugal, both repetitive and disparate” nature of war.

This Library of America volume brings together three books along with 26 uncollected New Yorker pieces and two excerpts from The Republic of Silence (1947), Liebling’s collection of writing from the French Resistance.

The Road Back to Paris (1944) narrates Liebling’s experiences from September 1939 to March 1943, including his shock at the fall of France and dismay at isolationist indifference in the United States; it contains classic accounts of a winter voyage on a Norwegian tanker during the battle of the Atlantic, visits to front-line airfields in North Africa, and the defeat of a veteran panzer division by American troops in Tunisia. Mollie and Other War Pieces (1964) brings together Liebling’s portrait of a legendary nonconformist American soldier in North Africa with his eyewitness account of Omaha beach on D-Day, evocative reports from Normandy, and investigation of a German atrocity in rural France.

In Normandy Revisited (1958) Liebling writes about his return to France in 1955 and recalls the joyous liberation of his beloved Paris while exploring with bittersweet perception how wartime experience is transformed into memory. The selection of uncollected New Yorker pieces includes a profile of an RAF ace, surveys of the French underground press, and an encounter with a captured collaborator in Brittany, as well as postwar reflections on battle fatigue, Ernie Pyle, and the writing of military history.

Pete Hamill, volume editor, is the author of 22 books, including News Is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century and the novels Forever and North River. As a journalist he has reported on wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland, written columns for several newspapers and magazines, and served as editor-in-chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Florence Gould Foundation.

A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings is kept in print by a gift from the Florence Gould Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

News “One More Beach to Cross”: Reliving D-Day through the Eyes of Those Who Were There
June 6, 2024

Interviews Pete Hamill on A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings
August 7, 2020

Interviews Rick Atkinson on Cornelius Ryan’s “vivid, visceral, riveting” histories of World War II
July 1, 2019

News Documentary GI Jews lends new texture to the American World War II saga
April 11, 2018
Table of Contents

The Road Back to Paris
I. The World Knocked Down
The Shape of War
Reflections in a Cul-de-sac
Toward Paris: 1939
My Generals, My Generalissimo
Bajus Disappointed
Vire Revisited
Merry Christmas, Horrid New Year
Colonel Albatross
Sample Supermen
The Knockdown: Paris Postscript
Who Do Not Fight, but Run Away
A Man Falling Downstairs
Once Down Is No Battle
II. The World on One Knee
No Place Like It
Rape Is Impossible
Destination: United Kingdom
Non Angeli Sed Angli
It Showed Nice Instincts
The Long Name for the Lifeboat
Rosie, You Be’ave Yourself
Dev’s Double
They Are Not Gone
Westbound Tanker
III. The World Gets Up
Toward a Happy Ending
Birds of My Country
What Do You Think That Bugle’s Blowing For?
The Hat of M. Murphy
Giraud Is Just a General
The Foamy Fields
First Act at Gafsa
Gafsa Revisited
Under the Acacias

Mollie and Other War Pieces
Confusion Is Normal in Combat
Quest for Mollie
For Boots Norgaard
The Foamy Fields
P.S. on Rozanoff—1954
Gafsa
Entr’acte
Run, Run, Run, Run
Notes from the Kidnap House—1944
And So to Victory
For Bunny Rigg—Cross-Channel Trip
Direction: Paris
Letters from France
My Dear Little Louise
Letter from Paris
Day of Victory
Massacre
The Events at Comblanchien—November, 1944

Uncollected War Journalism
Letter from Paris, October 22, 1939
Letter from Paris, January 12, 1940
Letter from France, February 11, 1940
Letter from Paris, March 9, 1940
Letter from Paris, April 21, 1940
Eight White Ships of Denmark
Notes on Repatriation
Colonel Britton and the Rhythm
The Lancashire Way
Paddy of the R.A.F.
Guerrilla from Erie, Pa.
Letter from Tripoli, May 1, 1943
Notes from the Kidnap House, Part I and Part III
Letter from France, August 10, 1944
Letter from Paris, September 15, 1944
Letter from Paris, September 22, 1944
Letter from Paris, October 26, 1944
Colonel Baranoff and The Newspaper “PM”
Colonel Grinker and Major Spiegel
The Conscience of Monsieur B
From The Republic of Silence
Argument of this Book
In Lieu of Epilogue
Letter to The New York Times Book Review
France’s Strange Defeat
Pyle Set the Style
The Eternally Kicked-in-the-Pants
Monsieur Flandin’s Domaine
The Beginning of the End

Normandy Revisited
Weymouth Pier
The Men in the Water
Tickety-Boo on Easy Red
Madame Hamel’s Cows
The Communion Card
The Hounds with Sad Voices
The Farmer’s Boy
Michel’s Mountain
Days with the Daydaybay
The Navel of the Loire

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-018-6 1089 pages

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N° 181 Library of America Series

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