Today, Karl Marlantes's debut novel, Matterhorn, is garnering praise for its vivid, trenchant portrayal of American soldiers in the thick of the Vietnam War. But for more than thirty years, the manuscript languished in literary purgatory, while the author struggled to find an agent—not to mention a publisher—willing to take it on. Published in April as a collaboration between the California-based small press El León Literary Arts and Grove/Atlantic, the book—at nearly 650 pages, including a glossary—owes its existence to people in disparate pockets of the publishing industry, as well as to the extraordinary persistence of its sixty-five-year-old author. "There were many times I would say to myself, ‘Are you crazy, Marlantes? You've been powering away at this damn book for so long. Maybe you don't know how to write,'" he recalls, still sounding slightly dazed by his success.

The book's genesis began in 1968, when Marlantes was shipped off to Vietnam as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps. In those days, he explains, "boys did the service, and then they came home and married the girls and had the babies. When I signed up, I had never even heard of Vietnam." He'd joined right out of his Oregon high school, but first served in the reserves under a program that allowed him to attend college at Yale University during the school year and report to boot camp during the summers in between; after graduation, he would still owe the Marines three years of service. Midway through his final year at Yale (where a short story he wrote earned him the Tunic Prize for literature), Marlantes heard that he had been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, for which he had applied to study politics, philosophy, and economics. With soldiers in such high demand, he was pleasantly surprised when the Marines gave him permission to pursue his scholarship at Oxford University. But once he arrived in England, he couldn't stop thinking about his friends serving in Vietnam. After only one semester, he decided to join them. "I saw very clearly that privilege was getting kids out of serving, and it was not right," he says.

During his subsequent thirteen-month tour of duty, he kept a sporadic journal, dimly aware that it could be fodder for future writing. "Any writer is going to think about people like [Siegfried] Sassoon, [Robert] Graves, and [Norman] Mailer, who went through these experiences and wrote great literature about them," he says. "I guess part of me thought, ‘Oh, when I get out I'm going to write a great novel about the Vietnam War.'" At the time, of course, he had more immediate concerns. "There is no more intense experience that I can think of that lasts that length of time," he says. "But the overall feeling of combat, for me, is sadness. You come away with memories of the intensity and the excitement—you can't deny that it's exciting—but it's just so frightening." Despite that fear, Marlantes's bravery in combat earned him the Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism; the award citation noted his "courage, aggressive fighting spirit, and unwavering devotion to duty in the face of grave personal danger."

Soon after arriving back in the United States, he began writing. "I typed out, almost manically, about 1,700 double-spaced pages of psychotherapy," he says. Once he'd gotten that out of his system, he realized that his stream-of-consciousness ramblings didn't exactly qualify as a literary classic, and "basically threw the pages away." The writing binge, though, had fixed in his mind certain details that would prove crucial during the coming years of rewrites and rejections. "I spent a lot of time trying to come to terms with my own war experiences," he says, both through writing and through therapy. As he did, in the years that followed, he began to consider how he might write about those experiences more constructively and decided it would be most freeing to do it through fiction.

From the first page of Matterhorn, Marlantes plunges readers into a forbidding jungle full of lively, confused, and terrified young soldiers trying to find their way—and themselves—under incredibly harrowing conditions. As we follow them on their journey away from and back to the hilltop fire-support base from which the book takes its name, their story is anchored by achingly specific details that are clearly drawn from the author's firsthand knowledge: a breakfast of "ham and lima beans mixed with grape jelly," jungle air so humid that "normal envelopes would stick together before anyone could use them," leeches determined enough to crawl up into a soldier's urethra. "Things in the book aren't exactly things that I experienced, but there's no doubt that those characters are seeing things that I saw and experiencing things I did experience," he says. All the while, the characters grapple with the dilemma Marlantes has carefully laid out for them: How do you learn compassion in the middle of a war?

Marlantes started seriously writing the first draft of the novel in 1975, and worked on it for about a year and a half. In 1977, when he began to reach out to agents and publishers, his subject made the book far from an easy sell. "Back then it was like, ‘Oh God, Vietnam. No one's interested in this. Please, we want to forget about it,'" he recalls. "The war was so unpopular, they didn't want to touch it." He estimates that he sent out about twenty-five queries, which were all rejected—no one even requested that he send the manuscript for them to read. Discouraged, he put it away.

For most of the seventies, living in Portland, Oregon, Marlantes worked as a lumber salesman to support his growing family—he had gotten married in 1972, and he and his wife went on to have four children (the couple later divorced; he has one child from his second marriage). In 1978, he shifted his focus and began working for an energy-consulting firm. Building on that experience, he started his own business in 1980 to provide consulting services for coal, oil, and gas companies. But his book project was never far from his mind, and the real advantage of working for himself was that it gave him more time to write. "I would pick away at it in between consulting assignments or at night," he says, trying to improve the manuscript and cut it down, since some of the more practical feedback he'd gotten was that, at about 1,200 pages, it was far too long.

In the mid-1980s, Marlantes started thinking more strategically about selling his book, devouring articles and handbooks with titles like "How to Write the Killer Query Letter That Can't Be Refused!" Having regrouped, he was ready to send out another round of queries. But nearly ten years after his first attempts, agents and editors were still almost uniformly indifferent. "If anyone answered, it was always like, ‘Oh yeah, Vietnam. Hollywood's already done it: Full Metal Jacket, Platoon,'" Marlantes says. Adding to his frustration was the fact that it was never his writing that was being rejected—no agent ever even wanted to see it—but the idea behind it. After having received about fifteen rejections, he felt too defeated to keep at it. Over the next ten years, Marlantes regularly revisited his manuscript, but discouragement kept him from sending it out again until the mid-1990s. This time, responses to his queries ran along the lines of, "It sounds interesting, but could you set it in the Gulf War and maybe cut it in half?" Again, fifteen rejections proved to be the magic number that sent him back to the drawing board.

Over the years, Marlantes found that the rejections could be infuriatingly contradictory. Once, he was told that the book had great characters but a weak plot. A few days later, another rejection letter praised the plot and said the characters were weak. "They just don't want to tell you, ‘We don't think we can make money on it,'" Marlantes says now. While he often felt frustrated and upset by the rejection, he kept at it. Sending more queries in the mid-2000s—after another ten-year gap and further attempts at revision—brought a familiar refrain: "Maybe you could set it in Afghanistan, that might work better—and cut it in half."

For a long time, Marlantes says, he didn't really think about why he persevered in the face of so much rejection; writing this book was just a part of his life. But recently, prodded by his publicist at Grove/Atlantic, he gave it some thought and recalled a day very soon after he'd gotten back from the war. He was in Washington, D.C., serving the remainder of his three-year Marine Corps hitch assigned to the Pentagon. Walking down Pennsylvania Avenue wearing his uniform, he saw a group of students across the street, holding Vietcong and North Vietnamese flags. "They were shouting insults and swearing at me and giving me the finger," he recalls. "I was just stunned. I wanted to say, ‘You don't know who you're talking to. All the friends I just left behind in Vietnam are younger than you are, and I'm just your age!' I began to realize that what I wanted to do was reach across that street. I wanted to write to explain myself and my friends."

After years of studying the "right" route to publication, Marlantes got a break that deviated gratifyingly from the script. In the fall of 2007, he sent the manuscript to his friend Ken Pallack, who had asked to read it simply because he was interested in Marlantes's writing. With the manuscript on his desk, Pallack got a fortuitous call from Tom Farber, a college friend he hadn't spoken to in quite a while. Pallack knew that Farber was a professor of creative writing at the University of California in Berkeley, but since they'd last spoken, Farber told him, he'd founded a small nonprofit publishing house called El León Literary Arts, which published "books that seem to be unable to be published elsewhere in the commercial marketplace." Pallack told Farber that he happened to have a promising manuscript right in front of him, and Farber told him to have the author send it to El León's senior editor, Kit Duane.

Marlantes was dubious. "I said to him, ‘Ken, you want me to go down to Kinko's and spend fifty dollars copying this manuscript about Marines in Vietnam to send to a woman in Berkeley?'" But his war novel turned out to have a broader appeal than he'd imagined. "I was captured from the very first page," Duane says. "Karl always had the broader perspective as he wrote, that the world is much more than the one human being who is seeing it and feeling it. I'm always very picky about that."

Duane accepted the book, and Marlantes's deal with El León stipulated that the press would print 1,200 copies; the author's compensation would be 120 books. "I thought, ‘Boy, that's the best offer you've had in thirty-two years,'" he says, laughing. He remembers Farber telling him, "‘You don't have to change a thing if you don't want to. We'll publish it just the way it is.' But Kit would say things like, ‘Come on Karl, this is just a little tedious here.' And she was right." When it came to editing, "almost everything I did with Karl was of a more technical nature," Duane says. The two worked together to tighten the book as a whole, and to compress some sections. Duane wasn't concerned about the book's considerable length—when it landed on her desk, it ran 712 manuscript pages—which for so many other publishers might have been a deal breaker. At El León, "we don't judge books that way," she explains simply.

"We're operating with a lower burden in terms of the cost per book than New York City publishers are," Farber says. "So we have some freedom of motion that corporations don't have. But of course, it's a tightrope act." Matterhorn was scheduled to be released in May 2009, and in the lead-up Marlantes sent several of his advance copies to some independent bookstores he thought might be interested in carrying it (without the resources to print galleys, the books were part of El León's sole print run). The staff of Annie Bloom's Books, in Portland, Oregon, was enthusiastic, and asked if Marlantes would be interested in giving a reading. Someone there also told a reporter from the Oregonian about the meaty novel by a local author, and the paper ran a favorable article about him that spring. Soon after, several other bookstores asked him to come read.

In the meantime, El León had submitted the book for consideration in Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program—just as a long shot, Farber says. The book was getting great reads from the selection committee, but its members were concerned about El León's ability to meet the increased demand that would come if Matterhorn was selected for special promotion: 1,200 copies wouldn't be nearly enough to distribute for sale across Barnes & Noble's stores, and the small press simply didn't have the resources to produce a more substantial print run. So the buyers and readers employed by Barnes & Noble—including the Discover program's director, Jill Lamar, and the company's influential lead fiction buyer, Sessalee Hensley—started spreading the word about their find. It was Hensley who brought it to the attention of Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of the venerable publishing house Grove/Atlantic. Entrekin's interest was quickly piqued.

Marlantes's original contract with El León stated that the company had every right worldwide for three years, or until the run sold out. Meeting to hash out a deal, Farber and Entrekin agreed that Grove/Atlantic would buy the entire run and pull the book from Amazon, where it had just gone on sale. They also agreed ("exceedingly generously," in Marlantes's view) to cover El León's printing costs for the book, and they offered the press a small cut of the profits. From there, Grove/Atlantic took over all aspects of the production and publicity. Farber is pleased to see El León's name on the book alongside Grove's, and when he explains that his "entertainment and travel budget last year—including the mandatory board meeting for a 501(c)(3)—was $125," it's clear that the deal eased El León's burden in ways that were vital for its survival.