Samuel Hynes

The 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards were presented to Randall Kennedy for Race, Crime, and the Law and Samuel Hynes for The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern Conflict.

Samuel Hynes’s The Soldiers’ Tale focuses on the two World Wars and Vietnam, and on the accounts written by victims of war and survivors of prisoner-of-war camps, the Nazi death camps, and the atom bomb. Hynes draws from the journals of troops on the front lines, prisoners enduring unspeakable ordeals, and works by prominent literary figures like Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Elie Wiesel, and Tim O'Brien. Hynes received the Distinguished Flying Cross as a Marine pilot in World War II. He is an Emeritus Professor of English at Princeton.