Language English Publication date 1979 ISBN 0-89673-035-2 Country United States of America Pages 189 pp | Publisher Exeter Books Media type Print (hardback) Originally published 1979 Genre Novel OCLC 5653595 | |
The Deer Hunter is a novelization by the American writer E. M. Corder based upon the screenplay by Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino of the 1978 war drama film The Deer Hunter, a film that won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
The novel is set in southern Vietnam, in Pittsburgh and in working-class Clairton, Pennsylvania, a Monongahela River town south of Pittsburgh. The book follows a trio of Rusyn American steel worker friends—Michael "Mike" Vronsky, Steven Pushkov, and Nikanor "Nick" Chevotarevich—both before and during their infantry service in the Vietnam War.
The screenplay itself was loosely inspired by the German novel Three Comrades (1937), by World War I veteran Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, which follows the lives of a trio of World War I veterans in 1920s Weimar Germany.
The epigraph is from Ernest Hemingway:
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.