Audie MurphyTo Hell and Back
Originally published in 1949, To Hell and Back was a smash bestseller for fourteen weeks and later became a major motion picture starring Audie Murphy as himself. More than fifty years later, this classic wartime memoir is just as gripping as it was then.
Audie Murphy was born into a large sharecropper family in Hunt County, Texas. The seventh of twelve children. His father abandoned the family, and his mother died when he was a teenager. Murphy dropped out of school in fifth grade to pick cotton and find other work to help support his family, and his skill with a hunting rifle was a necessity for feeding them. His older sister helped him to falsify documentation about his birth date to meet the minimum-age requirement for enlisting in the military.
