World War I in literature

thumb|right|A scan of a final draft of [[Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen, penned by the author.]]Literature about World War I is generally thought to include poems, novels and drama; diaries, letters, and memoirs are often included in this category as well. 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. Many of the works during and about the war were written by men because of the war's intense demand on the young men of that generation; however, a number of women (especially in the British tradition) created literature about the war, often observing the effects of the war on soldiers, domestic spaces, and the home front more generally.

<!-- John Masefield submitted a report to the British Foreign Office, and suggested that he be allowed to write a book about the failure of the allied efforts in the Dardanelles, which possibly could be used in the U.S. in order to counter what he thought was German propaganda there. As a result, Masefield wrote Gallipoli. This work was a success, encouraging the British people, and lifting them somewhat from the disappointment they had felt as a result of the Allied losses in the Dardanelles. Due to the success of his wartime writings, Masefield met with the head of British Military Intelligence in France and was asked to write an account of the Battle of the Somme. Although Masefield had grand ideas for his book, he was denied access to the official records, and therefore, what was to be his preface to the book was published as "The Old Front Line", a description of the geography of the Somme area.

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General

The spread of education in Britain in the decades leading up to World War I meant that British soldiers and the British public of all classes were literate. Professional and amateur authors were prolific during and after the war and found a market for their works.

Literature was produced throughout the war - with women, as well as men, feeling the 'need to record their experiences' - but it was in the late 1920s and early 1930s that Britain had a boom in publication of war literature. However, only a small fraction still is known today, and several poets that were popular with contemporary readers are now obscure. Robert Bridges contributed a poem Wake Up, England! at the outbreak of war that he later wished suppressed., John Masefield, who later succeeded Bridges as poet laureate, wrote August, 1914, a poem that was admired widely.

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. In preparing for the publication of his collected poems, Owen tried to explain:

Epic poem In Parenthesis by David Jones (artist-poet) has also been widely hailed as a masterpiece.

The poem In Flanders Fields by John McCrae continues to be one of the more popular wartime poems in Canada, and has achieved a status where it is recognized as one of the country's most notable unofficial symbols.

The expressionist poet August Stramm wrote some of Germany's important poems about the war.

From the war itself until the late 1970s, the genre of war poetry was almost exclusively reserved for male poets. This was based on an idea of an exclusive authenticity limited to the works of those who had fought and died in the war. It excluded other forms of experience in the war, such as mourning, nursing and the home front, which were more likely to be experienced by other demographics such as women. There were over 500 women writing and publishing poetry during World War I. In 1913, when it seemed that war might yet be avoided, he published a long anti-war poem called The Wine Press. During World War I, Noyes was debarred by defective eyesight from serving at the front. Instead, from 1916, he did his military service on attachment to the Foreign Office, where he worked with John Buchan on propaganda. 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. The work of fiction, and the award-winning film adaptation have had a greater influence in shaping public views of the war than the work of any historian.

Remarque's book was partly based on Henri Barbusse's 1916 novel Under Fire. Barbusse was a French journalist who served as a stretcher-bearer on the front lines, and his book was very influential in its own right at the time. By the end of the war, it had sold almost 250,000 copies and read by servicemen of many nations.

American novelist, John Dos Passos, was a volunteer ambulance driver during the war. He wrote his first novel, the anti-war One Man's Initiation: 1917, in the trenches (later published in 1920.) The book was reprinted in 1945, under the title First Encounter. His postwar war novel, Three Soldiers, brought him fame and critical recognition.

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. These include England's Effort (1916), Towards the Goal (1917), Missing (1917), The War and Elizabeth (1917) and Fields of Victory (1919).

British novelist W.F. Morris wrote two mystery novels set in the Great War- Bretherton (1929) and Behind the Lines (1930). Morris served in the British army during the war.

A Farewell to Arms is a novel by Ernest Hemingway set during the Italian campaign of World War I. 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. The publication of A Farewell to Arms cemented Hemingway's stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as "the premier American war novel from that debacle World War I."

The popular literary characters Biggles and Bulldog Drummond were created by veterans of the war, W.E. Johns and H.C. McNeile respectively. Both characters served in the war and shared some their creators' history. The Bulldog Drummond books were popular among veterans after the war. - arguing that retrospective accounts are often disillusioned.

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. The novel was not published in English until 2011.

Although most famous for his popular Hornblower series of Napoleonic War adventure novels, C.S. Forester also wrote three novels set in the First World War. Of the three, only one- The General (1936) was set on the Western Front, the others The African Queen (1935), which was famously filmed in 1951, was set in German East Africa and Brown on Resolution (1929), was a naval adventure set in the Central Pacific. According to one source, Adolf Hitler admired the novel The General in the late 1930s and recommended it to his generals due to its depiction of the British military mindset.

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. 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. 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.

Late 20th-century and beyond

Novels concerning World War I continued to appear in the latter half of the 20th century, albeit less frequently.

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.

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'. 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.

How Young They Died (1968) by Stuart Cloete was possibly the last novel written by an actual veteran. Elleston Trevor had made his name in the 1950s through episonage and WW2-themed novels but he turned to World War I with his novel Bury Him Among Kings (1970).

The novel Goshawk Squadron (1971) by Derek Robinson depicts a British air-force unit in the closing months of World War I, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was later followed by two 'prequels' set earlier in the conflict, War Story (1987) and Hornet's Sting (1999). 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. Canadian novelist Timothy Findley's novel of the conflict The Wars was published in 1977 and it received his country's top award for literature.

War Horse (1982) by Michael Morpurgo is set in World War I and won the Whitbread Book Award for 1982. It has been adapted into a play and film. U.S. writer Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War and French novelist Sebastien Japrisot's A Very Long Engagement both appeared in 1991. The novel Birdsong (1993) by Sebastian Faulks received much praise.

Of similar acclaim is Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy; the third novel from the series The Ghost Road, received the most prestigious award in British fiction: The Booker Prize in 1995 (though the nomination implied the award was for the whole series). In 2014, during the centenary of the World War I, the Indian author Akhil Katyal published the poem 'Some letters of Indian soldiers at World War One' marking the contribution of more than a million Indian soldiers to the war.

To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War (2004) is a novel written by Jeff Shaara that uses perspectives from the generals and the doughboys and from the Allies and the Germans.

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 2016 novel No Man's Land by Simon Tolkien (grandson of J. R. R. Tolkien) portrays a working-class boy who has been adopted by a wealthy family and who interrupts his Oxford studies to serve in the trenches.

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. The novel depicts the struggles of displaced people to build a new life during the war and dramatizes the lynching of Will Brown in Omaha during the Red Summer that followed the war.

Memoirs

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. It was translated into French as Les Premiers Cent Mille. Due to its popularity in the United States, which was neutral at the time, Beith was transferred to the British War Mission in Washington, D.C.

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).

After the war many participants published their memoirs and diaries. One of the first was Storm of Steel (1920) by German writer Ernst Jünger, an account of his experiences as an officer on the Western Front (it was first published in English in 1930). 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. These were shortly joined with Undertones of War (1928) by Edmund Blunden, Good-Bye to All That (1929) by Robert Graves, A Subaltern's War (1929) by Charles Edmund Carrington, A Passionate Prodigality (1933) by Guy Chapman and Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) by Percy Wyndham Lewis. 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.

British WW1 veteran George Coppard published his memoir With a Machine-Gun to Cambrai in 1968 while former airman Arthur Gould Lee produced his own memoir No Parachute the same year.

The memoir Somme Mud was written in the 1920s but not published until 2006, over two decades after the author's death. The author, Australian Edward Francis Lynch, fought with the AIF in France in 1916–1918.

The Burning of the World, 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.

Theatre

Plays about World War I include:

Journey's End (1928), by R. C. Sherriff
The Silver Tassie (1928), by Sean O'Casey
Post-Mortem (1930), by Noël Coward
For Services Rendered (1932), by Somerset Maugham
The One Day of the Year (1958), by Alan Seymour
Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963), by Joan Littlewood
The Accrington Pals (1982), by Peter Whelan
Not About Heroes (1982), by Stephen MacDonald
Once on Chunuk Bair (1982), by Maurice Shadbolt
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), by Frank McGuinness
My Boy Jack (1997), by David Haig
An August Bank Holiday Lark (2014), by Deborah McAndrew
Anzac Eve (2017), by Dave Armstrong

French literature on WWI

Novels inspired by the author's experiences

Le Feu : journal d'une escouade / Henri Barbusse
La Percée : roman d'un fantassin (1914-1915) / Jean Bernier
L'Appel du sol / Adrien Bertrand
Voyage au bout de la nuit / Louis Ferdinand Céline
La Peur / Gabriel Chevallier
Les Poilus / Joseph Delteil
Les Croix de Bois / Roland Dorgelès
Ceux de 14 / Maurice Genevoix
Solitude de la Pitié / Jean Giono
Le Grand troupeau / Jean Giono
Les Silences du colonel Bramble; suivi des Discours et nouveaux discours du Docteur O'Grady / André Maurois
Capitaine Conan / Roger Vercel
Clavel soldat / Léon Werth

Other French novels

La Sentinelle tranquille sous la lune / Soazig Aaron
Les Beaux quartiers / Louis Aragon
La Maison rose / Pierre Bergounioux
Comme le temps passe / Robert Brasillach
Les Ames grises / Philippe Claudel
Meuse l'oubli / Philippe Claudel
Les Roses de Verdun / Bernard Clavel
Thomas l'imposteur / Jean Cocteau
Le Der des ders / Didier Daeninckx
La Comédie de Charleroi / Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
La Chambre des officiers / Marc Dugain
Le Monument : roman vrai / Claude Duneton
14 / Jean Echenoz
Dans la guerre / Alice Ferney
Partita / Roger Grenier
Le Palais d'hiver / Roger Grenier
Le Sang noir / Louis Guilloux
Derrière la colline / Xavier Hanotte
De secrètes injustices / Xavier Hanotte
Les Lieux communs / Xavier Hanotte
Un Long dimanche de fiançailles / Sébastien Japrisot
Waltenberg / Hédi Kaddour
L'Equipage / Joseph Kessel
Le Chercheur d'or / Jean-Marie-Gustave Le Clézio
Au revoir là-haut / Pierre Lemaître
Les Thibault (n°1-2-3) / Roger Martin du Gard
Le Bruit du vent / Hubert Mingarelli
Quatre soldats / Hubert Mingarelli
Les Enfants de la patrie (n° 1-2-3-4) / Pierre Miquel
La Poudrière d'Orient (n° 1-2-3-4) / Pierre Miquel
La Liberté guidait leurs pas (n° 1-2-3-4) / Pierre Miquel
Le Diable au corps / Raymond Radiguet
Les Hommes de bonne volonté (n° 1-2-3-4) / Jules Romains
Les Champs d'honneur / Jean Rouaud
Le Collier rouge / Jean-Christophe Rufin
L'Acacia / Claude Simon
Bachir, le brave tirailleur / Idir Tas
Quatre soldats français (n° 1-2-3-4) / Jean Vautrin
Alexis ou le traité du vain combat; suivi de Le Coup de Grâce / Marguerite Yourcenar

German literature on WWI

Im Westen nichts Neues / Erich Maria Remarque
War / Ludwig Renn

References

External links

Budgen, David: Literature, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
De Schaepdrijver, Sophie: Literature (Belgium), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Hüppauf, Bernd: Literature (Germany), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Todero, Fabio: Literature (Italy), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Whalan, Mark: Literature (USA), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Potter, Jane: Literature (Great Britain and Ireland), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Beaupré, Nicolas: Literature (France), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Szczepaniak, Monika: Literature (Austria-Hungary), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Billeter, Nicole: Literature (Switzerland), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Critical Study: The Scarlet Critique: A Critical Anthology of War Poetry by Pinaki Roy, New Delhi: Sarup Book Publishers, 2010,
The Pities of War: A Brief Overview of the First World War British Poets and Poetry by Pinaki Roy, in The Atlantic Critical Review Quarterly (International), Vol. 9, No. 1, January–March 2010, pp. 40–56 (, )
Critical study of Wilfred Owen's oeuvre and his life: Wilfred Owen: The Man, the Soldier, the Poet (Kolkata: Books Way, 2013) by Pinaki Roy ()
"Schriften des zum Scheitern Verurteilt: First World War German Poetry" by Pinaki Roy, in Journal of Higher Education and Research Society (ISSN 2349-0209), 3.1 (April 2015): 249–59.
"The English Trench-writers of 1014-18: A very brief Review" by Pinaki Roy, in Labyrinth (ISSN 0976-0814), 8.2 (July 2017): 83–95.
"The History of War-plays: A Brief International Exploration" by Pinaki Roy, in Theatre International (ISSN 2278-2036 TI), XII (January 2020): 90–99.
An A-level study site
A sixth from perspective-including literature and the technology of war
See the original editions of some of the books listed here and many other works of Great War Literature
The Dutch Publishing House Dulce et Decorum concentrates on publishing translations of World War I literature.
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive (an online repository of over 4000 items of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research.)

de:Liste literarischer Werke zum Ersten Weltkrieg