The War Lover
  • Published:
    Jun-1959 (Hardcover)
  • Formats:
    Print / eBook
  • Main Genre:
    General Fiction
  • Time Period:
    WWII (1939-1945)
  • Pages:
    404
  • Purchase:
  • Share:
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.
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EDITIONS
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    •  
    • Jun-1959
    • Random House
    • Hardcover
    • ISBN: 0394450981
    • ISBN13: 9780394450988
    •  
    • Sep-2019
    • Knopf
    • eBook
    • ISBN: 0593080882
    • ISBN13: 9780593080887



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