Anton Olmstead Myrer (November 3, 1922 – January 19, 1996) was a United States Marine Corps veteran and a best-selling author of American war novels that accurately and sensitively depict the lives of United States military personnel while in combat and in peace time.

His 1968 novel, Once An Eagle, written at the peak of the Vietnam War, is required reading for all Marines and is frequently used in leadership training at West Point.

The novel, considered a classic of military literature and a guide to honorable conduct in the profession of arms, has been compared favorably to Leo Tolstoy's magnum opus War and Peace.

Myrer wrote eight other novels, of which The Big War (1957) was adapted for a movie in 1958 and The Last Convertible (1978) was made into a television mini-series in 1979.

I enlisted imbued with a rather flamboyant concept of this country's destiny as the leader of a free world and the necessity of the use of armed force.

I emerged a corporal three years later in a state of great turmoil, at the core of which was an angry awareness of war as the most vicious and fraudulent self-deception man had ever devised.

On February 20, 1996, Patricia Myrer wrote a letter to her close friend, popular Chicago radio personality Art Hellyer, informing him that Anton had suffered from acute leukemia for nine months prior to his death and had been in isolation in a local hospital.

[7] The donation was used to purchase and preserve quality fiction published until the death of Henry James (1916), and serious literary criticism.

In 1997, Patricia Myrer donated funds to the United States Army War College Foundation and the republication rights to her husband's novel Once An Eagle.

[10] The book has remained in print ever since and is required reading at the United States Army War College.