In Many Wars, by Many War Correspondents

Corralled in the Imperial Hotel, the journalists had nothing much to do except tell stories in the bar and write about local flora. A few of them, including Jack London and Richard Harding Davis, decided to contribute short autobiographical stories recounting their most exciting journalistic experiences for a book to be edited by Lynch and his American colleague, Frederick Palmer. The correspondents told their tales in different ways-prose, poems, sketches, and even a short play. Their stories recounted their routines, failures, and triumphs, including surviving battles and waiting to see action. One contributor imagines bewhiskered correspondents in 1950 still awaiting permission from Japan to go to the front-only to learn the war had been over for thirty-nine years.

John Maxwell Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent, is the author of Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting and other books. He is executive vice chancellor and provost of Louisiana State University, LSU Foundation Hopkins P. Breazeale Professor, and the founding dean of LSU's Manship School of Mass Communication.