["Johnny Got His Gun"] is one of the most horrifying books ever written…. You have heard of the "basket cases" that are a byproduct of war. Perhaps you have seen one, and if you have you have almost certainly asked yourself, as you looked at the armless, legless object: What is it thinking and feeling? How can it go on living? The obvious answer to the second question is that a basket case has no power of self-destruction. The answer to the first question is the story of &...

["Johnny Got His Gun"] is a tour de force which derives its intense but morbid interest not from any of the common allurements of fiction, but from the unraveling of an unusual physical and psychological puzzle. The solution is one of considerable brilliance and probability, and it holds the reader engrossed. This view of his book may surprise Mr. Trumbo, for there is evidence that he intended the novel as a passionate jeremiad against war, and as a dramatization of the sufferings that must co...

["Johnny Got His Gun"] is a fierce, brave and extraordinary novel. The author is a young Virginian who has drawn on his own varied experience of living as the back drop for the breathless silent statement of the mind and memory of Joe Bonham. The ebb and flow of consciousness in the mind of Joe Bonham makes up the book. It is a simple, direct and terrible story, in the telling. Joe, small town American, was wounded and mutilated beyond belief, in the war of 1914–18, but yet continued to...

The author of that gruesome memento mori called "Johnny Got His Gun" has tied one hand behind his back and tossed out a jaunty little fantasy ["The Remarkable Andrew"] about the ghost of General Andrew Jackson intervening to save an honest young bookkeeper from the machinations of a crooked political clique in a small Western town. Aside from being a rather thinned-out version of "The Devil and Daniel Webster," it gets in some easy and not very telling cracks at pol...