This study focuses on the thematic preoccupations that emerged from writers’ immersion in and resistance to the Second World War. Through 7 chapters - Documenting, Desiring, Killing, Escaping, Grieving, Adjusting and Atomizing - the book sets middlebrow and popular writers alongside residual modernists and new voices to reconstruct the literary landscape of the period, arguing that the postwar is a concept that emerges almost simultaneously with the war itself, and that “peace’ is significant only by its absence in an emergent post- Atomic cold war era.