SOURCE: "Cold War, Religious Revival and Family Alienation: William Styron, J. D. Salinger and Edward Albee," in Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature, International Publishers Co., 1965, pp. 211-42.

In this excerpt, Finkelstein discusses Styron's novella in the context of the Cold War period, and he notes what he considers Styron's accurate portrayal of the military's complete disregard for the value of human life.

Styron's short novel, The Long March, has the distinction of being one of the few novels registering the actual impact on the American mind of the Korean war. In the course of this war a hysteria was whipped up such as had not been found necessary in the Second World War. In that anti-fascist war, there had been no policy of answering fascist brutality with like brutality and inhumanity. But now, under the assurance that the struggle was against communism and communism was by its...