Cornelius Ryan: The Longest Day (D-Day June 6, 1944), a Bridge Too Far (Loa #318), Hardcover

For the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a deluxe collector's edition gathering two gripping masterpieces of military history.

Library of America presents two of the best books ever written about World War II in a deluxe collector's edition featuring 88 pages of photographs, full-color endpaper maps, rare archival material revealing how the books were written, and a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Rick Atkinson (The Liberation Trilogy). The Longest Day tells the story of the Allies' greatest success, the Normandy invasions of June 6, 1944, Operation Overlord; A Bridge Too Far recounts perhaps their greatest failure, the catastrophic airborne invasion of Holland in September 1944, known as Operation Market Garden. Together, they reveal not only the twisting fortunes of war and the grand sweep and scale of the largest amphibious and airborne invasions ever mounted, but also the very real human experience of combat, the small but momentous individual acts that can change the course of history. No one has told these stories more powerfully than Cornelius Ryan.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Born in Dublin, Cornelius Ryan (1920-1974) covered the war in northwest Europe as a correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, 1944-45, before moving to the United States in 1947, working as a writer for Collier's Weekly. After the demise of Collier's Ryan began writing a book about D-Day. The Longest Day (1959) was followed by The Last Battle (1966), about the fall of Berlin, and A Bridge Too Far (1974), published shortly before his death from cancer.

Editor Rick Atkinson (b. 1952) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian. He is the author of The Long Gray Line (1989); Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (1993); In the Company of Soldiers (2004), based on his embedded reporting from Iraq in 2003; and the acclaimed Liberation Trilogy: An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 (2002); The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (2007); and The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (2013)