World War I in literature
Although the canon continues to be challenged, the texts most frequently taught in schools and universities are lyrics by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen; poems by Ivor Gurney, Edward Thomas, Charles Sorley, David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg are also widely anthologized.
Wilfred Owen was killed in battle; but his poems created at the front did achieve popular attention after the war's end, e.g., Dulce Et Decorum Est, Insensibility, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility and Strange Meeting.
[10] This included work as a literary figure, writing morale-boosting short stories and exhortatory odes and lyrics recalling England's military past and asserting the morality of her cause.
[8] These works are forgotten today apart from two ghost stories, "The Lusitania Waits" and "The Log of the Evening Star", which are still occasionally reprinted in collections of tales of the uncanny.
British novelist Mary Augusta Ward wrote generally pro-war novels, some at the request of United States President Theodore Roosevelt, which nevertheless raised questions about the war.
[13] This was followed in subsequent years by others, including Through the Wheat (1923) by Thomas Alexander Boyd, the "Spanish Farm Trilogy"—Sixty-Four (1925), Ninety-Four (1925) and The Crime at Vanderlynden's (1926)—by Ralph Hale Mottram, Death of a Hero (1929) by Richard Aldington, The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929) by Frederic Manning, The Patriot's Progress (1930) by Henry Williamson, Generals Die in Bed by Charles Yale Harrison (1930) and Winged Victory (1934) by Victor Maslin Yeates.
Willa Cather wrote One of Ours in 1922, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her novel that tells the story of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska farmer who escapes a loveless marriage to fight in the War.
Journalist Evadne Price wrote a semi-biographical novel Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War (1930) about ambulance drivers based on women she had interviewed.
The book, published in 1929, is a first-person account of American Frederic Henry, serving as a lieutenant ("Tenente") in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army.
The novel is about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of World War I, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations.
French writer and former infantryman on the Western Front Gabriel Chevallier wrote a novel Fear in 1930, based on his own experiences in the Great War.
[18] Writer William March, who fought with the U.S. Marines in France during World War I, wrote a novel Company K in 1933, loosely based on his own experiences.
[19] Another American writer Dalton Trumbo wrote a bitterly anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun in 1938 which won a National Book Award the following year and was made into a film in 1971.
[20] New Zealander John A Lee, who fought as an infantryman in World War I and who lost an arm, produced a novel Citizen into Soldier (1937) inspired by his own experiences.
The novel Return to the Wood (1955) by James Lansdale Hodson depicted the court-martial of a British soldier accused of desertion, and the book was adapted as the play Hamp in 1964 by John Wilson and filmed as King and Country by Joseph Losey in the same year.
[22] The novel Covenant with Death (1961) by John Harris portrays a Sheffield Pals Battalion on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and Christopher Hitchens later referred to it as a 'neglected masterpiece'.
[23][24] In the mid-1960s, there was a resurgence of fiction depicting the aerial campaigns of World War I, including The Blue Max (1964) by Jack D. Hunter, which became a major film in 1966 along with A Killing for the Hawks (1966) by Frederick E. Smith and In the Company of Eagles (1966) by Ernest K. Gann.
Three Cheers for Me (1962) and its sequel That's Me in the Middle (1973) by Donald Jack, are narrated by fictional Canadian air ace Bart Bandy; both won the Leacock Medal.
The 2011 novel The Absolutist was written by John Boyne, the story featuring two teenage friends who enlist in the British army together and experience the war on the Western Front.
The 2017 novel Kings of Broken Things by Theodore Wheeler follows the Miihlstein family as they are displaced by fighting in Galicia during World War I and relocate to Omaha, Nebraska.
Captain John Hay Beith's The First Hundred Thousand, a best-selling account of life in the army, was published in 1915 and became one of the more popular books of the period.
The memoirs of several famous aerial 'aces' were published during the war, including Winged Warfare (1918) by Canadian William Bishop, Flying Fury (1918) by English ace James McCudden and The Red Fighter Pilot (1917) by Manfred von Richthofen (the latter two men were killed in action after their books were written).
The first memoirs of Allied combatants were published in 1922, not long after the armistice: A Tank Driver's Experiences by Arthur Jenkins and Disenchantment by Charles Edward Montague.
[13] Memoirs of airmen included Wind in the Wires (1933) by Duncan Grinnell-Milne, Wings of War (1933) by Rudolf Stark and Sagittarius Rising (1936) by Cecil Arthur Lewis.
[32] Nurses also published memoirs of their wartime experiences, such as A Diary without Dates (1918) by Enid Bagnold, Forbidden Zone (1929) by Mary Borden, Testament of Youth (1933) by Vera Brittain and We That Were Young (1932) by Irene Rathbone.
[34] The Burning of the World,[35] first published in 2014, was a memoir of the Great War on the Eastern Front by Hungarian writer & painter Bela Zombory-Moldovan who enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1914 at age 29.
