"[A] gripping new translation." --Samantha Power, from the Foreword
The novel that has done more than any other to inspire opposition to war, in a major new translation that captures its undiminished literary power for a new generation
With a Foreword by Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning,
New York Times bestselling war correspondent, human rights advocate, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
A Penguin Classics Hardcover
Galvanized by youthful idealism and patriotic fervor, nineteen-year-old Paul B�umer and his schoolmates enlist in the German army at the onset of World War I. But soon their dreams of heroism shatter beneath the first shells of the bombardment, as they find on the battle front not the glory they were promised but savage brutality.
The most influential war novel of all time,
All Quiet on the Western Front has sold more than twenty million copies, been translated into more than fifty languages, and been adapted into three acclaimed films. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Bob Dylan included it among three books that have left an impression on him since elementary school: "This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. . . . I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did." In this brilliant new translation, the distinguished Harvard professor Maria Tatar draws on her lifelong engagement with German literature to give a new generation of readers an English version that comes closest to the lyrical tragedy of the 1929 original. It compels us to see with fresh eyes the abject horror of trench warfare, and to feel with a quickened heart the unbreakable bonds of friendship forged among Paul and his fellow soldiers as they fight not just for their country but also for their own survival. At a time when we are more divided than ever, Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel reminds us that enemy soldiers who've been demonized by the rhetoric of war actually have much in common, giving it the potential to generate principled outrage about the senselessness of war for another hundred years.
Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) wrote his most famous novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, based on his experience as a soldier in the German army in World War I; it became an instant bestseller upon its publication in 1929. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they burned his books and, in 1938, revoked his citizenship. Remarque had already resettled in Switzerland; in 1939 he left Europe for the United States, never to return to the country of his birth. All Quiet on the Western Front has been translated into more than fifty languages and adapted into three acclaimed movies. It is the most widely read novel of World War I.
Maria Tatar (translator) is the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Folklore & Mythology and Germanic Languages & Literatures, Emerita, and a senior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. She is the author, editor, and translator of many acclaimed books, among them
The Heroine with 1001 Faces,
Lustmord: Sexual Violence in Weimar Germany, and, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the NAACP Image Award-winning
Annotated African American Folktales. She served as Harvard's first Dean for the Humanities and is a frequent contributor to the BBC, NPR, and other media outlets. Born in Pressath, Germany, and raised in Illinois, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Samantha Power (foreword) is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book
"A Problem from Hell" America and the Age of Genocide and the
New York Times bestselling memoir
The Education of an Idealist. A former war correspondent, she served as the US ambassador to the United Nations, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and a member of President Obama's cabinet. She is a professor of practice at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School.
