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A staggering classic of World War II that the New York Times called "the best war novel yet written by an American"

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, countless American writers attempted to use fiction to convey the complicated experience they'd just undergone. Few of the novels that emerged from that period were as ambitious and powerful as The Young Lions, a sweeping, dramatic account of war from the point of view of ordinary solders that depicts the danger, excitement, trauma, and loss of a no-holds-barred global war. 
When Irwin Shaw published The Young Lions, he was known solely as a writer of short stories, and his panoramic, detailed, unforgettable account of the war was met with nothing short of awe. Shaw tells his story from the points of view of a perceptive young Nazi, a jaded American film producer, and a shy Jewish boy just married to the love of his life. Together they enable us to see, decades lateer, as no other novelist has since, the scope, confusion, and complexity of war.

This is a landmark novel that Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley ranked with wartime classics like From Here to Eternity, The Naked and the Dead, and The Caine Mutiny. As James Salter writes in his foreword, "The Second World War was the central event of Shaw’s generation. The writers who stand in some glory about its forgotten battlefields and whose novels came from firsthand knowledge—Mailer, heller, James Jones, Michener—include, indomitable in their midst. Irwin Shaw. He need not to have bowed to any of them then, or, if he were still alive, now."

Finalist, 2015 National Jewish Book Awards in the American Jewish Studies category 
Winner, 2017 AJS Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in the category of Modern Jewish History and Culture: Africa, Americas, Asia, and Oceania

Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American public’s ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new “Jewish” war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism.