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Cornelius Ryan: The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far

Edited by Rick Atkinson

“A gifted reporter and writer, Cornelius Ryan set the standard for telling war stories that fly by like the best novels. Any reader seeking both the broad strokes of military strategy and the gritty, surprising, inspiring, and often terrible details of combat can do no better than these two books.”
—Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and Huê 1968

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

News “One More Beach to Cross”: Reliving D-Day through the Eyes of Those Who Were There
June 6, 2024

The Moviegoer We will film them on the beaches: Darryl F. Zanuck’s The Longest Day
July 23, 2019

Interviews Rick Atkinson on Cornelius Ryan’s “vivid, visceral, riveting” histories of World War II
July 1, 2019

A veteran journalist fascinated by the experiences of “ordinary people caught up in fear and crisis,” Cornelius Ryan combined exhaustive research with a novelist’s gift for storytelling in his brilliant World War II classics The Longest Day (1959) and A Bridge Too Far (1974). For each book Ryan interviewed or corresponded with hundreds of military veterans and civilian participants, weaving their individual stories together in books at once epic in scale and intimate in focus.

A visit to the Normandy beaches in 1949 inspired Ryan to write a book about D-Day, a task that took a decade to complete. The Longest Day is a democratic history in which American paratrooper John Steele, hanging from a church steeple in the midst of battle, and German infantryman Josef Häger, trapped inside a besieged bunker, share the stage with top commanders General Dwight Eisenhower and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Ryan captures the nervous anticipation felt by Allied servicemen and French civilians as they await the signal for the invasion; chronicles the confused German response to the Allied onslaught; and provides cinematic depictions of the grim battle for Ste.-Mère-Église, the desperate assault on the Merville battery, and the bloody struggle to get off Omaha Beach.

In Ryan’s tragic masterpiece A Bridge Too Far (1974), Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s uncharacteristically bold plan to end the war in 1944 by crossing the Rhine in Holland sets in motion the greatest airborne assault in history. Ryan narrates with consummate skill the heartbreaking hour-by-hour unraveling of Operation Market Garden as the Allied offensive encounters unexpected German resistance, precipitating a series of merciless battles fought in the Dutch countryside and the shattered streets of Nijmegen and Arnhem. Written as Ryan was fighting his own private battle with cancer, A Bridge Too Far is an unforgettable story of physical and mental suffering, bewildering confusion, stubborn endurance, and unyielding courage.

This authoritative Library of America volume also collects seventeen of Ryan’s wartime dispatches for the London Daily Telegraph, including his eyewitness account of D-Day as seen from an American bomber; magazine stories that supplement The Longest Day; revealing letters to publishers; and samples of the research questionnaires he sent to veterans. It restores to print the full-color endpaper maps from the first edition of The Longest Day, and includes an introduction, a chronology of Ryan’s life and career, explanatory endnotes, eighty-eight pages of photographs, and eleven black and white maps.

Rick Atkinson, editor, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and historian who worked for twenty-five years as a correspondent and editor for The Washington Post. He is the author of several books, including the acclaimed Liberation Trilogy about World War II: An Army at Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, The Day of Battle, and The Guns at Last Light, as well as The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777, the first volume in the Revolution Trilogy.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Florence Gould Foundation and Malcolm O’Hagan.

Cornelius Ryan: The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far is kept in print by a gift from the Pritzker Military Museum & Library to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

News “One More Beach to Cross”: Reliving D-Day through the Eyes of Those Who Were There
June 6, 2024

The Moviegoer We will film them on the beaches: Darryl F. Zanuck’s The Longest Day
July 23, 2019

Interviews Rick Atkinson on Cornelius Ryan’s “vivid, visceral, riveting” histories of World War II
July 1, 2019

Video Watch: Why Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day isn’t “victors’ history”
June 20, 2019

Story of the Week Cornelius Ryan, “The Longest Day Dawns”
June 6, 2019
Table of Contents

Introduction by Rick Atkinson

THE LONGEST DAY: JUNE 6, 1944
Foreword: D Day, June 6, 1944
Part One: The Wait
Part Two: The Night
Part Three: The Day
A Note on Casualties
D-Day Veterans: What They Do Today
Acknowledgments
Bibliography

A BRIDGE TOO FAR
Foreword: Operation Market-Garden, September 17–24, 1944
Part One: The Retreat
Part Two: The Plan
Part Three: The Attack
Part Four: The Siege
Part Five: Der Hexenkessel
A Note on Casualties
The Soldiers and Civilians of A Bridge Too Far: What They Do Today
Acknowledgments
Bibliography

OTHER WORLD WAR II WRITINGS
Selected Dispatches for The Daily Telegraph, 1944–45
The Major of St. Lô (1957)
The Longest Day (1965)
Untold Stories from The Longest Day (1974)
To William Buckley, November 19, 1957
To Peter Schwed, February 24, 1959
Sample Response to Questionnaire for The Longest Day: William Rhinehart Washington (c. 1958)
Sample Response to Questionnaire for A Bridge Too Far: J. T. Richards (c. 1967)

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-611-9 1000 pages

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N° 318 Library of America Series

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