Cornelius Ryan: The Longest Day (D-Day June 6, 1944), a Bridge Too Far (Loa #318) - (Hardcover)

About the Book

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 Hèager, 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.-Máere-âEglise, 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 endudurance, and unyielding.

Book Synopsis

For the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a deluxe collector's edition gathering two gripping masterpieces of military history.

Library of America presents two of the best books ever written about World War II in a deluxe collector's edition featuring 88 pages of photographs, full-color endpaper maps, rare archival material revealing how the books were written, and a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Rick Atkinson (The Liberation Trilogy). The Longest Day tells the story of the Allies' greatest success, the Normandy invasions of June 6, 1944, Operation Overlord; A Bridge Too Far recounts perhaps their greatest failure, the catastrophic airborne invasion of Holland in September 1944, known as Operation Market Garden. Together, they reveal not only the twisting fortunes of war and the grand sweep and scale of the largest amphibious and airborne invasions ever mounted, but also the very real human experience of combat, the small but momentous individual acts that can change the course of history. No one has told these stories more powerfully than Cornelius Ryan.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Review Quotes

"Military history at its best. . . . Cornelius Ryan captured it all with his seamless first-person accounts, which flesh out the minute-by-minute military narrative. Every paragraph leaps with action. . . . Not only does it hold up after 60 years, it should be required reading in every high school and college in America for the next 50 years." --Winston Groom, The Wall Street Journal

"There are plenty of authoritative histories of the D-Day landings, but few can match Cornelius Ryan's storytelling prowess in The Longest Day." --Jade Colbert, The Globe and Mail

"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

About the Author

Born in Dublin, Cornelius Ryan (1920-1974) covered the war in northwest Europe as a correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, 1944-45, before moving to the United States in 1947, working as a writer for Collier's Weekly. After the demise of Collier's Ryan began writing a book about D-Day. The Longest Day (1959) was followed by The Last Battle (1966), about the fall of Berlin, and A Bridge Too Far (1974), published shortly before his death from cancer.

Editor Rick Atkinson (b. 1952) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian. He is the author of The Long Gray Line (1989); In the Company of Soldiers (2004), based on his embedded reporting from Iraq in 2003; and the acclaimed Liberation Trilogy: An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 (2002); The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (2007); and The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (2013)