This title presents an authentic voice for the experiences of the Americans who volunteered for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War.

These letters will lift your spirit and break your heart. They will take you back to a time when 2,800 Americans took up arms and confronted Hitler's Condor Legion, Mussolini's Black Shirts, and Franco's fascist cavalry on the battlefields of Spain. Here are the actual letters that Abraham Lincoln Brigade members wrote home from 1936 to 1939. Here are accounts of their combat experiences, the love letters they wrote under fire, tales of the friendships they formed among themselves and with their Spanish comrades, and their reports of history's first saturation bombing of civilian targets in Madrid and Barcelona. It was the eve of World War II, and these men and women saw clearly the danger the world was facing. Now, both those who died and those who lived tell us their stories for the first time.

"Rolfe's voice is one that many of us feared was buried forever. . . . He stands in the forefront of an entire 'lost generation' of left-wing writers who fused artistic craft with irrepressible political commitment." -- Alan Wald, author of The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment "[Rolfe's] Spanish Civil War poems may be the best written by an American writer, and his McCarthy era poems brilliantly counteract the often apolitical, rather socially aseptic poetry of their time." -- Reginald Gibbons, editor of TriQuarterly The radical journalist and poet Edwin Rolfe wrote eloquently of the hardships of the Great Depression, the experience of war, and McCarthy era witch-hunts. More than fifty of his best poems--some beautifully lyrical and some devastatingly satiric--are included in Trees Became Torches. Rolfe was widely known as the poet laureate of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the Americans who volunteered to help defend the elected Spanish government during the 1936-39 civil war.