Mary Borden’s taut masterpiece has long been overshadowed by the other Great War books of 1928–29 (All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms ...

Steven Biel
Steven Biel is executive director of the Mahindra Humanities Center and senior lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. His books include American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting (Norton, 2005) and Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster (Norton, 1996).
B-Sides: Gustav Hasford’s “The Short-Timers”
By Steven Biel
The most persistent source of anguish in war stories may be the inability to tell them: the sense of a vast experiential and moral distance between the battlefield ...