Excerpt from Fortress America by Elaine Tyler May, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A major motion picture captured the anxiety of the immediate postwar years. The Best Years of Our Lives, winner of seven Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture, in 1946, garnered an audience of 55 million in the United States alone. In the film, three veterans return to their small town after the war. They are not the same as when they had left, and neither are their town and their families.

One of the three men is a wealthy banker. In his absence, his daughter has become a mature young woman; his son rejects his war souvenirs and questions him about the horrible effects of the atomic bombs. His wife tends to him as if he were a child and attempts to control his drinking, but without much success. A second man, a soda jerk before the war, returns a hero, but he is shell-shocked. The corner drugstore where he used to work has been bought out by a corporate chain, and he is without a job. His wife, whom he wed just before going overseas, loses interest in him absent the glamour of his uniform, turns to other men, and leaves him. When he spends a fitful night at the banker's home, it is the banker's daughter who comforts him and eases his nightmares. The third man, a sailor, has lost his arms along with his sense of self; his devoted and loving girl-next-door sweetheart finally restores his sense of manhood.

All three come home broken in mind and body, and all three are nurtured back to mental health and manly competence by strong women. In the end, the women's efforts are successful: they heal their men to the point that they can reassert their proper roles as husbands. The war hero relives the nightmares of combat at an airfield full of abandoned aircraft like the ones he flew during the war, and he is offered a job taking the planes apart and turning the scrap metal into materials to be used to build suburban houses, like the one he hopes to live in with his new wife (the banker's daughter). But in spite of the happy ending, the world had changed. The couples face new challenges and insecurities, just as the film's large and appreciative audiences did in real life.

Excerpted from Fortress America by Elaine Tyler May. Copyright © 2017 by Elaine Tyler May. Excerpted by permission of Basic Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.