American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam

American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam is a perceptive and evocative book that is both a comprehensive discussion of the literature of the war and a study of literature and literary consciousness considered in relation to the larger process of cultural myth-making. In his exploration of the ways in which writers have tried to make sense of the Vietnam experience, Philip Beidler brings to light a whole literature that in its moments of fullest achievement quite literally creates a Vietnam more real than reality. In his discussion of the literature of the war he turns his attention to a wide variety of literary texts: novels, plays, poems, memoirs, oral histories, and works of documentary and reportage. Beidler begins with an analysis of the peculiar difficulties involved in writing about an experience like Vietnam. He moves from the early attempts to deal with the experience (including Norman Mailers Why Are We in Vietnam? and Arthur Kopits Indians) to more recent works as diverse as Robert Stones Dog Soldiers, Tim OBriens Going after Cacciato, Phillip Caputos A Rumor of War, Michael Herrs Dispatches, the plays of David Rabe, the poems of John Balaban and Bruce Weigl, and recently published experiments in oral history such as Al Santolis Everything We Had and Mark Bakers Nam.