Across American literature, soldiers may be seen as heroes, everymen, or criminals, traditions created at different historical moments and lingering in the American imagination in complex ways. This essay explores representations of soldiers at different moments in American literary history, focusing on how literary movements have affected and been affected by wars, including the aesthetics of sentimentalism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism as they influence representations of soldiers. It looks at the tension in American ideology between a primacy on the individual and the responsibilities of community. The essay also examines the relation between soldiering and gender, a relation about to be complicated by the formal entrance of women into combat roles.