Cover art by Samuel H. Bryant
The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck (Little Brown, 1959),[1] also published as Hunting the Bismark (Michael Joseph, 1959), was written by C.S. Forester (1899–1966), the author of the popular Horatio Hornblower series of naval-themed books. Closely based on the actual naval battle, the book is a novel with fictionalized dialogue and incidents.
The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck tells the story of the breakout of the German battleship Bismarck into the Atlantic as a major threat to the convoys that sustained Britain in the early days of World War II and the Royal Navy's desperate pursuit and destruction of the Bismarck. Sink the Bismarck!, a movie based on Forester's book, was released by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1960, with the book reprinted in paperback under the title Sink the Bismarck! (Bantam, 1959) as a promotional tie-in.