War novel Facts for Kids

A war novel is a type of novel that tells a story happening during a fight or war. These books often focus on the main action taking place during armed battles.

Sometimes, war novels also show what life is like on the "home front" – meaning, back home while the war is happening. The characters in these stories might be getting ready for war, fighting in it, or trying to recover from it. War novels are also sometimes called military fiction.

History of War Stories
- First War Novels
War Novels in the 1800s
World War I and Beyond
World War II and Beyond
- Japanese War Novels
Vietnam War and After
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History of War Stories

People have been telling stories about war for thousands of years. In Ancient Greece and Rome and the Middle Ages, writers created long epic poems that often celebrated the glory of war.

Some famous epic poems include:

The Iliad by Homer (about the Trojan War)
The Aeneid by Virgil (about a hero after the Trojan War)
The Old English saga Beowulf (about a brave warrior)
The legends of King Arthur (about knights and battles)

Plays about human suffering, called tragedies, also influenced war novels. Playwrights like Euripides, Seneca the Younger, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare wrote plays that shaped how war is shown in books. For example, Shakespeare's play Henry V includes military strategies and discusses the ethics of war.

Other types of stories, like romance (adventure stories) and satire (stories that make fun of things), were also important. These works, especially in Early Modern Europe, showed both the bravery and the foolishness of war. Examples include The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.

Modern war novels also get their ideas and symbols from older works. For instance, Dante's description of Hell in The Inferno is similar to how war is sometimes described. Other influences are John Milton's Paradise Lost and the Apocalypse part of the Book of Revelation in the Bible.

First War Novels

The first novels about war appeared in the 1600s. Around this time, fiction books written in prose (like regular sentences, not poetry) became popular. These early war novels were often satires or picaresque novels. A picaresque novel follows a "rogue" or a clever, often dishonest, character.

In these early stories, the soldier was often shown as a rogue and not very realistic. One example is Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. This novel is partly based on the author's own life and tells a story set during the Thirty Years' War.

War Novels in the 1800s

Important war novels from the 1800s include:

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, which is about the Napoleonic Wars in Russia.
Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, which tells a story from the American Civil War.

World War I and Beyond

War novels written during and after World War I explored the experiences of trench warfare. They also started to tell stories about what happened at home during the war. Many books were written by authors from all countries involved in the conflict.

One of the first and most important of these was Le Feu (or Under Fire) from 1916. It was written by the French novelist and soldier Henri Barbusse.

The 1920s saw a big increase in war books, sometimes called the "war book boom." Many men who had fought in the war were finally ready to write openly and critically about their experiences. In 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque became a huge worldwide bestseller.

Other important books from this time include:

A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway
Death of a Hero (1929) by Richard Aldington
The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927) by Arnold Zweig
Generals Die in Bed (1930) by Charles Yale Harrison
Company K (1933) by William March

World War II and Beyond

Many novels came from the experiences of soldiers and people during World War II. These books were written not only by European authors but also by people around the world.

Japanese War Novels

After World War II ended, Japanese authors wrote many novels about their experiences. For example, Sakaguchi Ango published Idiocy (白痴) about the strange life in Japan after the bombings and losing the war.

There were also many novels about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such as:

Summer Flowers (夏の花) by Hara Tamiki in 1947
Black Rain (黒い雨) by Ibuse Masuji

Some novels were about being part of the kamikaze pilots. The 1949 book Last Friends (きけ、わだつみの声) was a best-seller about a group of soldiers leaving for the front.

Around 1970, a new type of novel appeared. Ordinary people started writing about their experiences of battles and air raids. Novels also began to appear about the many different ways the war ended, including stories of people left behind in China or becoming prisoners of the Soviet Union in Siberia.

Vietnam War and After

Many American and Vietnamese authors wrote books during or after the long Vietnam War. These novels explored the unique challenges and impacts of that conflict.