Brave Men

Description

The classic, human-scale account of World War II, by Pulitzer Prize winner Ernie Pyle—America’s most famous and most loved war correspondent—featuring a new introduction by David Chrisinger, the author of the new Ernie Pyle biography, The Soldier’s Truth

A Penguin Classic

When America entered World War II, Ernie Pyle followed the soldiers into the trenches. Long before television and the internet beamed combat footage directly to us, his from-the-frontlines dispatches augmented the coverage of the war’s politics, strategy, and macro-level mobilizations to give the American public what he called his “worm’s-eye view” of the day-to-day life of the war. He captured, as John Steinbeck described it in Time magazine, the “war of the homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food . . . and bring themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage—and that is Ernie Pyle’s war.” A number-one bestseller upon its publication in 1944, Brave Men remains unmatched in its clarity, sympathy, and grit as a chronicle of the war in Europe, and lives on as a testament to the enduring value of embedded journalism in reporting the truth.Ernie Pyle (1900–1945) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent. He worked as managing editor of The Washington Daily News and later became a roving journalist for Scripps-Howard Alliance. After many years following the fighting in Europe, he traveled to the South Pacific, where a sniper’s bullet took his life.

David Chrisinger (introduction) is the author of The Soldier’s Truth: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II and several other books, including Public Policy Writing That Matters, for which he won the National Council of Teachers of English George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. He directs the Harris Writing Workshop at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and leads memoir-writing workshops for military veterans and their families through The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit newsroom named in honor of Ernie Pyle that aims to improve our understanding of the true costs of military service. He lives in Chicago.US