Allan Wilford Howerton

War's Wake: How a Gi-bill Veteran and a Sophomore Lost Their Way in the Time of Harry Truman and Alger Hiss and Fell into Paradise Allan Wilford Howerton

Not every Greatest Generation soldier came home to settled lives graced by white picket fences. "War?s Wake" is a bittersweet, sometimes farcical love story from the aftermath of World War II set amid the Communist scare of the late nineteen forties and the ever-darkening shadows of the oncoming Cold War.

On a university campus bulging with ex-GIs, a traumatized combat veteran and an idealistic sophomore fell madly in love. Years later, the long-dead sophomore, invading his computer as he tries to make a novel of his life, lures him back to reprise what went wrong. Their bittersweet reassessments and besotted indulgences provide a wacky tour of Truman-era morality, a sobering look at postwar USA, and an ardent time-travel love story about memory, commitment, and the decisive decisions that frame our lives. By the end, as the tragically surprising reason for the romance's failure is finally revealed, readers may well ask of their own loves: Did it all really happen or was it only a fragment of a dream?

Within this beautifully written, brainy, and often witty love story, are a plethora of pensive observations about war and its repercussions, love and its consequences, writing and its perils, and death and its regenerations. "War's Wake" offers readers a view of "the greatest generation" myth through the fractured light of a rather different prism.