War as muse

More than any other before or since, World War I was our literary war.

Susan Cheever, E.E. Cummings: A Life

Susan Cheever

E.E. Cummings took part in World War I. In fact, he was a prisoner of war for three months. Susan Cheever lists several other writers from that war, some of whom died in it: Yeats, Owen, Brooke, Sassoon, Graves and Hemingway. There were a number of others, such as Erich Maria Remarque. Most of them were poets.

By the time World War II came along, just two decades later, poetry was in decline. This may be one reason why fewer writers emerged from that war. Yet still there was Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, James Jones and many more.

The Vietnam War inspired others.

These wars, as well as others, continue to motivate writers, even those writers who have never experienced war. War has just about everything that makes a dramatic story, or in Heller's case, a comic story. There's conflict and death, certainly, but also suspense, love, desperation, poignancy, fear, hope, heroism. Put war in the background of almost any story and you get a more powerful story. Take Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See as one example.

So every war is a literary war. But I agree with Cheever. The Great War produced great literature.