My Two Wars

Moritz Thomsen’s My Two Wars describes the great battles in his life – one against a rich, tyrannical father; the other against anti-aircraft gunners over Germany in 1943 and 1944. It was completed shortly before Thomsen’s death, and with it he concluded the story of his unusual life. In this posthumously published masterpiece he returns to his youth growing up in a wealthy Seattle household with the father he despised, and goes off to war in Europe as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force. In his introduction Page Stegner calls it “the best narrative account ever written of an imperfect and fragile human soul caught up in the air war over Germany.”
But it is Thomsen’s other war – his lifelong and monumental battle with his father – which begins and ends the book and makes My Two Wars one of the most outrageous and memorable father-and-son stories ever told.

Moritz Thomsen was a gifted and original writer and a genuine American rebel. In his late-forties, he joined the Peace Corps, and was sent to Ecuador where he lived as an expatriate for the next twenty-eight years and chronicled his life in four remarkable books that have been compared with the work of Thoreau and Joseph Conrad. His other titles include Living Poor, The Farm on the River of Emeralds and the Saddest Pleasure. He was born in 1915 in Hollywood, California and died in 1991 in Guayaquil, Ecuador.