SOURCE: An introduction to Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, edited by Philip K. Jason, University of Iowa Press, 1991, pp. ix-xix.

[In the essay below, Jason outlines the major issues and trends in Vietnam War literature and its criticism.]

There has always been a literature of war. The classical epics are among its early prototypes. In American literature, Whitman's Drum-Taps, Melville's Battle-Pieces, and Crane's The Red Badge of Courage form the nucleus of a significant literature of the Civil War—yet Whitman was the only major writer who put himself in some proximity to the horrors of battle. Melville was only a casual visitor, and Crane was born years after the war's close. From this beginning (though we could go back further), the war literature of American writers has been a mixture of testimony, commentary, and imaginative reconstruction. Though many more creative works about the Civil...