by kleinbl00

On the website and blog he kept before he died in 2016, Hamner wrote that he began developing the book on the beaches of Normandy while fighting in World War II: “I was scared and young and homesick, and as I wrote in my journal I began to remember a promise my father made to my mother on the day they were married. He promised that one day he would build her a house of her own on the top of a mountain. He used to say that the sun goes down too soon for a poor man, and so he never got around to building the house.”