What's to Become of the Boy?: Or, Something to Do with Books - Softcover

"Böll's writing is filled with a bleak beauty that unflinchingly gazes upon the sources of both the bleakness and the beauty of life ..." --The Rumpus

"What's to Become of the Boy? makes an ideal short introduction to Böll. At the same time, it offers an unusual perspective on Hitler's rise to power: The rise of totalitarianism and the stultification of civil society, as seen through the eyes of a teenage boy." --Anne Applebaum (from the new introduction)

"[P]ared down prose, lean but sturdy, subtle yet unsettling, always with the power to provoke and to devastate."
--The Quarterly Conversation

A vivid account of growing up poor, rebellious, and anti-Fascist in Nazi Germany

What’s to Become of the Boy? is a spirited, insightful, and wonderfully sympathetic memoir about life during wartime written with the characteristic brilliance by one of the 20th-century’s most celebrated authors. It is both an essential autobiography of the Nobel Prizewinning author and a compelling memoir of being young and idealistic during an age of hardship and war.