Historical Novels: The Readers’ Turn

Perhaps I overlooked something in your historical-fiction issue. How else to explain the slighting of novels with World War I settings in this otherwise interesting issue? Not a single novelist, journalist, or historian asked to name their favorite historical novel, not even those who had written about the Great War, named a Great War novel. It can’t be that the war was so uninteresting that such novels as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front , Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms , Faulkner’s A Fable, Gather’s One of Ours (the last two of which won Pulitzer Prizes) can be ignored.