Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) wrote his most famous novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, based on his experience as a soldier in the German army in World War I; it became an instant bestseller upon its publication in 1929. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they burned his books and, in 1938, revoked his citizenship. Remarque had already resettled in Switzerland; in 1939 he left Europe for the United States, never to return to the country of his birth. All Quiet on the Western Front has been translated into more than fifty languages and adapted into three acclaimed movies. It is the most widely read novel of World War I.

Maria Tatar (translator) is the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Folklore & Mythology and Germanic Languages & Literatures, Emerita, and a senior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. She is the author, editor, and translator of many acclaimed books, among them The Heroine with 1001 Faces, Lustmord: Sexual Violence in Weimar Germany, and, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the NAACP Image Award-winning Annotated African American Folktales. She served as Harvard's first Dean for the Humanities and is a frequent contributor to the BBC, NPR, and other media outlets. Born in Pressath, Germany, and raised in Illinois, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Samantha Power (foreword) is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "A Problem from Hell" America and the Age of Genocide and the New York Times bestselling memoir The Education of an Idealist. A former war correspondent, she served as the US ambassador to the United Nations, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and a member of President Obama's cabinet. She is a professor of practice at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School.