The Longest Day & A Bridge Too Far

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.

História