Reading Books Authored by Veterans This November

This post was written with research assistance from interns Janelle Mejías Trujillo and Ruby Lillie. 

This month, we have gathered a list of Library-featured authors that you may want to check out during Veterans Day—and beyond. Please enjoy their thoughtful talks from authors who served in the military as well as a talk about combat and the American soldiers by eminent historians of war.

To learn more about the Library’s Veterans History Project and veterans poetry collected by the American Folklife Center, check out these resources:

• Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yEnhOL6JWU 
• Explore: https://guides.loc.gov/folklife-creative-writing/poetry/veterans-poetry

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Elliot Ackerman is the author of several novels, including “Dark at the Crossing,” “Waiting for Eden” and “Red Dress in Black and White.” His most recent books “2034: A Novel of the Next World” and “2054,” written with Adm. James Stavridis, became an instant New York Times bestseller. Ackerman is also an essayist, journalist and short story writer; his writing frequently appears in the New York Times, Esquire and The New Yorker, and his stories have been included in “The Best American Short Stories” and “The Best American Travel Writing.” He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine. He served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor and the Purple Heart.

Watch

• “Human Side of War” panel (with Phil Klay and Roxana Robinson)
• “Stories From a Fallen World: A Tribute to Denis Johnson” panel 

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Phil Klay is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. Currently, he is a professor of English at Fairfield University. Klay is an essayist and author, and his works include “Redeployment”, which won the 2014 National Book Award, and “Missionaries,” which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2020 by the Wall Street Journal. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, among many others. His most recent book is “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War,” a collection of essays that explores the disconnection between the military and American civilian life.

Watch: 2015 National Book Festival

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Yusef Komunyakaa served in the Vietnam War as a correspondent; he was managing editor of military newspaper The Southern Cross during the war, for which he received a Bronze Star. His latest book of poems is “The Emperor of Water Clocks.” Komunyakaa’s other works include “Thieves of Paradise,” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award; “Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989,” for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; “Magic City; Dien Cai Dau,” which won the Dark Room Poetry Prize and “I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head,” winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award.

Watch:

• Komunyakaa discusses his favorite WWI authors and reads from his own work
• 2011 National Book Festival

Read:

• His poem “Thanks” in Poetry 180
• “Facing It,” poem included in Robert Pinsky’s “Favorite Project” that he worked on during his tenure as Poet Laureate

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 Tim O’Brien is an acclaimed author who served as an infantryman in the United States Army from 1969 to 1970. He received the National Book Award in Fiction for his novel “Going After Cacciato,” and his acclaimed work “The Things They Carried” won France’s Prix de Meilleur Livre Étranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. He has received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize lifetime achievement award and the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award. Other notable nonfiction works include his 1994 essay for the New York Times, “The Vietnam in Me,” in which he critiques the mythology of the Vietnam War.

Listen:

• James Alan McPherson and Tim O’Brien reading from their fiction

Watch:

• 2002 National Book Festival
• 2009 National Book Festival

Explore:

• Library of Congress Veterans History Project: William Timothy O’Brien Collection

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Finally, watch this talk with Two of the most prominent historians of war, Margaret MacMillan and Rick Atkinson, as they speak with philanthropist David M. Rubenstein about their work. Click on the image above or follow this link: https://www.loc.gov/item/2024697431/

Rick Atkinson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of seven previous works of history, including “The Long Gray Line,” the Liberation Trilogy (“An Army at Dawn,” “The Day of Battle” and “The Guns at Last Light”) and “The British Are Coming,” the first volume of the ongoing Revolution Trilogy. Atkinson was a staff writer and senior editor at the Washington Post for 20 years. His numerous awards include Pulitzer Prizes in history for his book, “An Army at Dawn,” and in national reporting for his work at the Kansas City Times.

Margaret MacMillan received her PhD from Oxford University, where she is currently an emeritus professor of International History, a title she also holds at the University of Toronto. She serves on the boards of Imperial War Museums and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Some of her works include nonfiction titles “Paris 1919,” “Nixon and Mao” and “The War that Ended Peace.” For “Paris 1919,” she was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize, the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize and other accolades. Her latest book is “War: How Conflict Shaped Us” and was featured in the 2022 U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Strategic Multilayer Assessment program as part of its Institute for National Strategic Studies/PRISM Speaker Series.

Tells us in the comments: who is your favorite veteran author?