As is All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back is a war novel in one sense, but since it deals with how Birkholz and his friends adjust to the postwar world and re-establish purpose and meaning to their lives, the novel is closely aligned with those novels that are concerned with similar situations — Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), John Dos Passes' 1919 (1932), and William Faulkner's Soldier's Pay (1926).