Authors
The historians, veterans, and novelists whose work defines how we understand war.
Antony Beevor
Narrative military history — WWII European theater
One of the most widely read military historians alive. Known for combining archival research with.
3 booksMax Hastings
WWII operational history and strategy
Former war correspondent turned historian. Writes with journalistic clarity and challenges received.
5 booksCornelius Ryan
WWII — D-Day, Market Garden, Berlin
War correspondent who witnessed D-Day firsthand. His trilogy pioneered the multiple-perspective.
3 booksEugene Sledge
Pacific theater — firsthand memoir
Marine veteran of Peleliu and Okinawa. With the Old Breed is considered the finest Pacific War.
1 bookStephen Ambrose
WWII — American GI experience
Popular historian who brought the stories of ordinary soldiers to a mass audience.
5 booksJohn Keegan
Military history — all eras
Perhaps the most influential military historian of the 20th century. The Face of Battle.
4 booksAnne Frank
Holocaust — personal diary
A Jewish girl who documented life in hiding during the Nazi occupation. Her diary is the most.
1 bookPrimo Levi
Holocaust — survivor memoir
Italian chemist and writer who survived Auschwitz. His memoirs are among the most important.
2 booksRick Atkinson
US Army in WWII — European theater
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His Liberation Trilogy is the definitive American account of the.
3 booksWilliam Shirer
Third Reich — political and military history
CBS correspondent in Berlin during the 1930s. His Rise and Fall of the Third Reich remains the.
2 booksElie Wiesel
Holocaust — survivor memoir
Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor. Night is the foundational text of Holocaust.
1 bookViktor Frankl
Holocaust — psychology and memoir
Psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor who developed logotherapy. Man's Search for Meaning has sold.
1 bookJames Jones
WWII Pacific — fiction
Combat veteran who served at Guadalcanal. His war trilogy — From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red.
2 booksJames Hornfischer
Pacific naval warfare
Naval historian whose accounts of Leyte Gulf and Guadalcanal are considered the finest Pacific.
4 booksIan Toll
Pacific War — naval and strategic
Author of the Pacific War Trilogy. Pacific Crucible, The Conquering Tide, and Twilight of the Gods.
3 booksWilliam Manchester
WWII Pacific — memoir and biography
Marine veteran wounded on Okinawa. Also Churchill's biographer. Goodbye, Darkness is one of the.
2 booksJohn Hersey
WWII journalism
War correspondent whose Hiroshima, published as an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1946, changed.
2 booksAlex Kershaw
WWII — American units in Europe
Military historian specialising in individual American units and soldiers. Known for vivid,.
3 booksLaura Hillenbrand
WWII biography
Author of Unbroken and Seabiscuit. Known for meticulous research and cinematic narrative nonfiction.
1 bookWładysław Szpilman
Holocaust — personal memoir
Polish-Jewish pianist who survived the Warsaw Ghetto. His memoir was adapted into Roman Polanski's.
1 bookArt Spiegelman
Holocaust — graphic memoir
Cartoonist whose Maus, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, became the first graphic novel to.
1 bookWalter Lord
WWII — narrative battle histories
The master of the minute-by-minute narrative. His accounts of Pearl Harbor, Midway, and Dunkirk, built from hundreds of participant interviews, defined popular battle history for a generation.
3 booksHerman Wouk
WWII — epic fiction
Navy veteran of the Pacific whose Pulitzer-winning fiction — The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, War and Remembrance — became the great American fictional chronicle of the entire war.
3 booksVasily Grossman
Eastern Front — fiction and war reporting
Red Army correspondent who covered Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin, and wrote the first published account of a Nazi extermination camp. His suppressed masterpiece Life and Fate is now ranked with Tolstoy.
3 booksBen Macintyre
WWII espionage and deception
The leading popular historian of wartime intelligence. His accounts of Operation Mincemeat, the Double Cross system, and Allied deception are built on declassified MI5 files.
4 booksPaul Brickhill
WWII — POW escapes and air war
Spitfire pilot, POW in Stalag Luft III, and participant in the tunnel scheme he later immortalised. The Great Escape and The Dam Busters founded the modern escape-and-mission genre.
2 booksRobert Leckie
Pacific theater — memoir and histories
Marine machine-gunner at Guadalcanal turned prolific military historian. His memoir Helmet for My Pillow became one half of HBO's The Pacific.
2 booksErnie Pyle
WWII — frontline war correspondence
The most beloved war correspondent of all time, who wrote the infantryman's war from North Africa to the Pacific, where he was killed in 1945. His columns won the Pulitzer Prize.
2 booksKate Quinn
WWII — bestselling historical fiction
The dominant WWII novelist of the 2020s. Her fiction — Bletchley codebreakers, Soviet snipers, Nazi hunters — is built on real women whose stories went untold.
3 booksAlistair MacLean
WWII — action fiction
Royal Navy veteran of the Arctic convoys whose thrillers defined the WWII adventure genre for thirty years and sold over 150 million copies.
2 booksWilliam Craig
WWII — narrative histories of the war's end
Historian whose interview-driven accounts of Stalingrad and the fall of Japan were written while the participants still lived.
2 booksErich Maria Remarque
WWI — German soldier's experience (fiction)
A wounded German veteran of the Western Front whose 1929 novel became the defining anti-war book of the century — and was burned by the Nazis, who stripped him of his citizenship.
1 bookErnst Jünger
WWI — German stormtrooper memoir
Decorated stormtroop officer wounded fourteen times, whose diary-based memoir renders trench combat with a cold, unflinching clarity unlike anything else in the war's literature.
1 bookRobert Graves
WWI — British officer memoir
Poet and classicist who served on the Western Front and was reported dead of his wounds at the Somme. His bitter, blackly funny memoir is a classic of the war.
1 bookSiegfried Sassoon
WWI — British officer memoir and poetry
Decorated officer turned public protester against the war, and one of its greatest poets. His lightly fictionalised memoirs trace an officer's path from patriotism to disillusion.
1 bookVera Brittain
WWI — nurse's memoir
Volunteer nurse who lost her fiancé, her brother, and her closest friends to the war. Her memoir is its definitive account from the home front and the hospital ward.
1 bookEdmund Blunden
WWI — British officer memoir
Poet who served two years on the Western Front, longer than almost any other writer of the war, and recorded it in prose of pastoral restraint and quiet horror.
1 bookSebastian Faulks
WWI — historical fiction
British novelist whose 1993 bestseller brought the tunnellers and trenches of the Western Front to a new generation of readers.
1 bookPat Barker
WWI — historical fiction
Booker Prize–winning novelist whose Regeneration trilogy explores shell shock, psychiatry, and the war poets through the real figures of Sassoon and W. H. R. Rivers.
1 bookBarbara Tuchman
WWI — narrative history
Two-time Pulitzer winner whose account of the war's opening month set the standard for narrative history and was read in the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1 bookChristopher Clark
WWI — origins and diplomacy
Cambridge historian whose study of how Europe stumbled into war in 1914 reshaped the modern debate over the question of war guilt.
1 bookHew Strachan
WWI — operational and global history
One of the foremost historians of the First World War, whose single-volume history restores its truly global scope.
1 bookRobert K. Massie
WWI — naval history
Pulitzer-winning biographer and naval historian whose account of the Anglo-German fleets and the Battle of Jutland reads like a novel.
1 bookPeter Englund
WWI — intimate global history
Swedish historian and member of the academy that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, who told the war through the diaries and letters of twenty ordinary people on every front.
1 bookAdam Hochschild
WWI — war and dissent
American historian who tells the war through both those who fought it and the Britons who resisted it, in a moral history of a society tearing itself apart.
1 bookPeter Hart
WWI — narrative battle history
Oral historian of the Imperial War Museum whose battle histories are built from the voices of the men who were there.
1 bookNorman Stone
WWI — the Eastern Front
Historian whose study of the Eastern Front rescued the war's forgotten half — the vast, mobile struggle between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia — from obscurity.
1 book