Company K

New York: Sagamore Press, Inc., 1957. Trade Paperback. Very Good. 5" x 8. 183 Pages. Reprint of the 1933 edition. Includes Roster of Company K. Green printer wrapper. American Century Series. First page is loose and slightly age-tanned. The next few pages have a hint of age-tanning but the remainder of the book consists of tight clean pages. World War I was more than a decade in the past before America was ready for a book like Company K. For the author, who had seen the fighting at first hand, had no apologies to offer, no patriotic slogans to shout, and no illusions to sustain. In this book, he undertook to reveal for the first time what war was really like in its smalles components: the bodies and hearts and minds of 113 men who made up an infantry company. Really a collection of tightly related episodes ratheer than a nove. Compnay K involves the reader intimately in the down-to-earth doings of a group of American fighting men of every sort, in their desperate loneliness, their reckless humor, their cruelties, their fears, their offhand immorality, their profound nobility. Compnay K still holds its place as a true and penetrating picture of the world's first great war. March began his writing career in 1928 and published many short stories before placing his first novel, Company K in 1933, several years after he had completed it. From the beginning to the end of his career March was drawn toward the treatment of what one reviewer called 'the eccentric and the horrible'. But his simple matter-of-fact treatment of even the most outlandish episodes give them a startling reality and became his hallmark