When it was first published in the US, The Martyred (1964) received the highest acclaim from both critics and the general reading public. This debut novel of Richard E. Kim (1932–2009), the first volume of a trilogy, remained The New York Times’s bestseller for twenty weeks and was nominated for the National Book Award. Translated into more than ten foreign languages, The Martyred enjoyed global popularity, eventually leading to the author’s nomination for the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature.

At first blush, such an instantly warm reception is certainly not something one would anticipate from a debut novel by an immigrant writer whose mother tongue was not English, someone who immigrated to the US at the age of twenty-three. In ‘Another War Raged Within’, a review published in The New York Times Book Review, Chad Walsh offered a eulogy, along with a caution against possible disappointment for those who might have expected either exoticism or scenes of military combat from this ‘Korean War’ novel: