About the Author

Owen W. Gilman Jr., Wayne, Pennsylvania, lives near Valley Forge National Park and is professor of English at Saint Joseph's University. He has written extensively about the literature and film of the Vietnam War and is coeditor of Rediscovering America: Critical Essays on the Literature and Film of the Vietnam War and author of Vietnam and the Southern Imagination, published by University Press of Mississippi.

Reviews

The Hell of War Comes Home makes a significant contribution to both American literature and the literature that is emerging from America's ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using material spanning from the American Revolution to our involvement in twenty-first-century conflicts, Owen W. Gilman Jr. aptly demonstrates that for Americans war is an 'ingrained habit' that has not been deterred by earlier wars and their literary responses. Placing the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the cultural and political contexts of both the Vietnam War and the post-Vietnam War era, Gilman provides a groundbreaking study of how American culture prefers to avoid reality by focusing on the superficial and living in Fantasyland instead of actively learning from our wars and contributing to the healing process necessary for the people who fight them.--Catherine Calloway, professor of English at Arkansas State University, coeditor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Tim O'Brien, and regular contributor to American Literary Scholarship, An Annual and the Oxford Online Bibliography series