All Quiet on the Western Front

An immediate sensation when it was published in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide since then, making it the best-selling German novel of all time. Its impact is indisputable: it has been adapted for film, television, and other media; has influenced all subsequent works of war literature; and has been taught in high school and college classes ever since.

Until now, one translation—published in 1929, and very much a product of its time—has introduced most readers in English to Remarque’s wrenching portrait of the horrors of trench warfare. Now, nearly a century later, renowned translator Kurt Beals recaptures the energy and descriptive force of the German original, rendering Remarque’s distinctly terse, telegraphic prose into a contemporary idiom, conveying for a new generation the immediacy and intensity of this classic novel.

Author Biography

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) was one the best-selling German-born authors of the twentieth century. Several of his novels portrayed the experience of war and its aftermath. All Quiet on the Western Front was his best-known and most widely read work. Kurt Beals is a visiting associate professor of German and a humanities fellow in literary translation at the University of Richmond. He has translated twentieth–century and contemporary works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Hermann Hesse, Reiner Stach, Regina Ullmann, and Anja Utler, among others. He lives in Virginia.