Looking for the Good War American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

Elizabeth D. Samet

eBook - 2021

"A remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words . . . A stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war." —Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington PostIn Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States' "exception...al" history and destiny. Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or... more