All Quiet on the Western Front

Paul Baumer enlisted with his classmates in the German army of World War I. Youthful, enthusiastic, they become soldiers. But despite what they have learned, they break into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. And as horrible war plods on year after year, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principles of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against each other--if only he can come out of the war alive. "The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first trank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW From the Paperback edition.

Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) was himself in combat during World War I, and was wounded five times, the last time very severely. During the postwar years he taught briefly, became a stonecutter in the cemetery of Osnabruck where he had been born in 1898, and served as an assistant editor of Sportsbild. Remarque came to the United States in 1939 and remained for the duration of World War II, but returned to Switzerland afterward. All Quite on the Western Front made him rich and world-famous at thirty-three, but these consequences did not still his intense determination to concentrate in his fiction upon the worst horrors of the age, war and inhumanity, with which nearly all of his nine subsequent novels have been concerned. Fawcett published Remarque's Bobby Deerfield in 1978.