The vortex of the twentieth century, the late 1930s and early to mid 1940s, provides an appropriate setting for Jennifer Egan's experiment in historical fiction. Many popular histories have glorified the bands of brothers and Rosie the Riveters of the so-called greatest generation. The best fiction and poetry of the 1940s offered a different, unflattering view. Journalists from that era—Martha Gellhorn, for one—said they needed fiction to get the history right (313). Literary treatments of the war focus on its incommunicability and on the crisis of meaning it inspired, but they have been vastly overshadowed by popular history books, documentaries, movies, and television shows that depend for their very production and distribution on an appeal to the fantasies that the contemporary war literature contradicts. In a decade when the idea of making America great again seems supercharged by notions of America when it was supposedly great, we can use some diving into the wreck.
Absurdity and Artistry in Twentieth Century American War Literature