War Is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War

by James Neugass

Book Overview

The newly discovered journal of an award-winning poet's experience on the front lines as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade--All Quiet on the Western Front for the Spanish Civil War

In 1937, James Neugass, a poet and novelist praised in the New York Times, joined 2,800 other passionate young Americans who traveled to Spain as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade--an unlikely mix of artists, journalists, industrial workers, and intellectuals united in their desire to combat European fascism.

Although rumors persisted over the years that Neugass had written a memoir, the manuscript of War Is Beautiful, a nuanced and deeply poetic chronicle of his service as an ambulance driver, did not come to light for sixty years, until a bookseller discovered it among papers in a New England house once occupied by the radical critic and editor Max Eastman. The memoir combines fast-paced accounts of darting onto battlefields to pick up the wounded with elegiac renderings of days spent "on alert" in an ever-changing series of sharply observed Spanish towns, enduring that most difficult of wartime activities: waiting.

Published now for the first time, War Is Beautiful is poised to take its place alongside works by Erich Maria Remarque, Ir ne N mirovsky, Wilfred Owen, and George Orwell as a transcendent contemporaneous rendering of wartime life. It includes some of Neugass's own photos taken while in Spain.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1595584277
• ISBN13: 9781595584274
• Release Date: November 2008
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.5"