thumb|1969 Canadian paperback edition of the first book.
The M*A*S*H book series includes the original novel that inspired the movie and then the TV series. The first, MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, was co-authored by H. Richard Hornberger (himself a former military surgeon) and W. C. Heinz (a former World War II war correspondent); it was published in 1968 under the pen name Richard Hooker. It told the story of a U.S. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea during the Korean War. In 1972, Hornberger (writing again as Hooker) published the sequel M*A*S*H Goes to Maine, covering the lives of the surgeons after they returned home from the war.
Following the success of the 1970 film M*A*S*H, publisher William Morrow and Company encouraged Hornberger to write a sequel. In 1972, the book M*A*S*H Goes to Maine was published, in which the characters Hawkeye, Trapper John, and Duke leave the military and practice medicine in Maine, where Hornberger himself had a private practice. Historiographer John Strausbaugh has called it "a bitter refutation of the goody two-shoes Alda vehicle".