''Last of the Conquerors'' is the 1948

debut novel A debut novel is the first novel a novelist publishes. Debut novels are often the author's first opportunity to make an impact on the publishing industry, and thus the success or failure of a debut novel can affect the ability of the author to p ...

African-American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American ...

journalist and editor

William Gardner Smith William Gardner Smith (February 6, 1927 – November 5, 1974) was an American journalist, novelist, and editor. Smith is linked to the black social protest novel tradition of the 1940s and the 1950s, a movement that became synonymous with writ ...

.Weik von Mossner, Alexa. "Last of the Conquerors". The

Literary Encyclopedia ''Literary Encyclopedia'' (Russian: Литературная энциклопедия) is a 12-volume encyclopedia published in the USSR from 1929 until 1939. It contains more than 5000 entries with a focus on Russian and Soviet authors, as well ...

. First published 19 August 200
accessed 20 September 2015.
/ref> The novel concerns the author's experience as an African-American GI serving in the

racially segregated Racial segregation is the systematic separation of people into race (human classification), racial or other Ethnicity, ethnic groups in daily life. Racial segregation can amount to the international crime of apartheid and a crimes against hum ...

United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cla ...

in US-occupied

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

after

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. The protagonist, Hayes Dawkins, has an affair with Ilse, a white German woman. He and Ilse struggle against racist Army officers and policies to sustain a relationship that some white soldiers condemn (although there are also many friendly whites who help them). ''Last of the Conquerors'' depicts post-

Nazi Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...

Germany as more racially tolerant than the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. While this depiction may or may not be accurate, Smith's novel is offering a critique of

Marshall Plan The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative enacted in 1948 to provide foreign aid to Western Europe. The United States transferred over $13 billion (equivalent of about $ in ) in economic re ...

rhetoric claiming that American society should be a model for the world, while African-Americans continued to suffer under the

Jim Crow The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Other areas of the United States were affected by formal and informal policies of segregation as well, but many states outside the Sout ...

system at home and in the military (an inconsistency noticed by many other writers, American and German, at the time).

References

External links

''Last of the Conquerors'', Summary and Review (with image) zsheppard Storify
1948 American novels African-American novels Novels set in Germany Novels set during World War II Farrar, Straus and Giroux books 1948 debut novels {{1940s-WWII-novel-stub