[1] His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America's class system.

His father, Paul Fussell (1895–1973), son of a widowed schoolteacher, became a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles with the firm of O'Melveny & Myers.

[citation needed] His daughter, Rosalind, is an artist-teacher in Arizona and the author of a graphic novel, Mammoir: A Pictorial Odyssey of the Adventures of a Fourth Grade Teacher with Breast Cancer.

[citation needed] Starting in 1941, Fussell attended Pomona College until he enlisted in the United States Army in September 1942 and was commissioned as an officer the next year.

He landed in France in fall 1944 as a 20-year-old second lieutenant with the 103rd Infantry Division, was wounded while fighting in Alsace, and was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

Following the end of the war in Europe, Fussell returned to the United States where he was assigned to the 45th Infantry Division, which was preparing for the anticipated Allied invasion of Japan.

However, a number of modern historians have criticised Fussell's treatment of the war as deeply flawed with significant factual errors and tendentious conclusions.

[18] The epiphany of his earlier essay, "My War", found full expression in his memoir Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (1996), "My Adolescent illusions, largely intact to that moment, fell away all at once, and I suddenly knew I was not and never would be in a world that was reasonable or just".

[5] The last book by Fussell published while he was alive, The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944–45 (2003)[19] was once again concerned with the experience of combat in World War II.