Johnny Got His Gun
Joe Bonham wakes in a hospital bed and slowly realizes that the shell that hit him took his arms, his legs, his eyes, his ears, and most of his face, but left him conscious. The novel runs entirely inside his head as he counts time by vibrations on the floor, remembers his Colorado boyhood and his last night with his girlfriend, and tries to find a way to communicate with the world. Dalton Trumbo wrote it on the eve of the Second World War and it won the National Book Award. Banned and reissued through Vietnam, it became a touchstone anti-war novel. Strayed told Tim Ferriss it hit her hard at fourteen and never left her.
What you might want to know about Johnny Got His Gun
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Dalton Trumbo's 1939 anti-war novel about a World War I soldier who wakes in a hospital with no limbs, no face, and a working mind.
On The Tim Ferriss Show episode 231, Strayed named Johnny Got His Gun among the books that shaped her, saying she read it at fourteen and that it permanently changed how she thought about war and the body.
The premise is brutal, and Trumbo does not look away. The violence is mostly remembered or implied rather than shown in real time, but the situation itself is harrowing throughout.
Johnny Got His Gun was written by Dalton Trumbo, published in 1939 by Citadel Press.
Johnny Got His Gun is 256 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Johnny Got His Gun takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Johnny Got His Gun is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
