Wall, Watchtower, and Pencil Stub: Writing During World War II

It has been said that during times of war, the Muses fall silent. However, anyone who has read the major figures of mid-twentieth-century literature—Samuel Beckett, Richard Hillary, Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others—can attest that it was through writing that people first tried to communicate and process the horrors that they saw during one of the darkest times in human history even as it broke out and raged on around them.

In Bearing Witness, John Carpenter explores ...