By the Editors
Many of the outstanding literary figures of the United States were drawn to the war. Some found inspiration on the battlefield, some were repelled by the slaughter, a few experienced the worst of it, yet emerged—apparently—without any affect on their future work. Here are a few details about the most notable of them with some of their war-related titles:
In Uniform: Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Hall
Hervey Allen, poet and novelist of historical fiction, was a lieutenant with the 28th Pennsylvania Division of the AEF and was gassed and wounded, subsequently suffering shell shock.
Toward the Flame, It Was Like This: Two Stories of the Great War.
James M. Cain, with other WWI vets Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Hemingway, a founding member of the "hard-boiled" school of fiction, served with the headquarters company of the 79th Division, AEF, and fought in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. His WWI story "The Taking of Montfaucon" appeared in the September 2007 issue of Over the Top.
Willa Cather, novelist, was inspired by reading her cousin G.P. Cather's wartime letters home to his mother. He was the first officer from Nebraska killed in World War I. Those letters are now held in the George Cather Ray Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries.
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for the war novel One of Ours, published in 1922.
e.e. cummings, novelist and poet, was a volunteer ambulance driver in France, and was later drafted into the U.S. Army. The Enormous Room, a modernist account of his internment on suspicion of espionage in France, is an enduring classic of war literature.
John Dos Passos, novelist, was a volunteer & U.S. Army ambulance driver on the Western and Italian Fronts. One Man's Initiation, Three Soldiers, U.S.A. Trilogy, Mr. Wilson's War.
William Faulkner, novelist, trained in Canada as an aviation cadet for the Royal Air Force.
His brief service in the RAF inspired his first published novel, Soldiers' Pay.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, novelist, commissioned in the 67th Infantry, but war ended before he shipped over. The exemplary author of the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald continually returns to the war in his work. This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night, The Great Gatsby.
James Norman Hall, prolific author in many genres who is best known for The Bounty Trilogy written with Charles Nordhoff, was a veteran of the British Army, in which he served as a machine gunner, the Lafayette Escadrille, and the U.S. Air Service. He finished the war as a POW.
Wrote three semi-autobiographical works covering his war experiences, Kitchener's Mob, High Adventure, and Flying with Chaucer. His history The Lafayette Flying Corps is one of twelve books he co-authored with Nordhoff.
Ernest Hemingway, novelist, Red Cross Volunteer on Italian Front. A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, many short stories.
Archibald MacLeish, poet, served with the Yale Mobile Hospital Unit, shifted to U.S. Field Artillery and commanded a battery in the Second Battle of the Marne and then became an instructor ordered stateside. Tower of Ivory, MacLeish's first collection, assembled while the poet was serving in the army, registers the disillusioning impact of World War I. "Memorial Rain" is a tribute to his brother Kenneth, who was killed in the war.
Carl Sandburg, poet and biographer, covered the war in neutral Sweden for the Newspaper Enterprise Association in 1918. Notable war poems—anti-war: "Iron" (1916), "Grass" (1918), "Planked Whitefish" (1919); pro-war: "The Four Brothers."
Gertrude Stein, poet, essayist and playwright, drove supply truck "Auntie" to supply French hospitals with partner Alice B. Toklas. Later said to Hemingway: "You are all a lost generation."
Gertrude Stein at the wheel of "Auntie," Alice standing alongside. The Ford Model T had been adapted into a supply van with an ambulance body.
Edmund Wilson, critic and journalist, served in U.S. Army Intelligence. To the Finland Station, a study of revolutions from the French to the Russian.
Edith Wharton, novelist and correspondent, recipient of the French Legion of Honor for her philanthropic work during WWI. Wrote memoir, Fighting France (1916), and a novella, The Marne (1918), critical of U.S. slowness to enter the war.
Thomas Wolfe, novelist, student at the University of North Carolina during the war.
The low, grey clouds are drifting ‘cross the sky,
While here and there the little smoke puffs break,
And now and then the shrapnel bursts on high,
And growling guns their mighty thunder make.
A war-ripped field, with what a tale to tell
A tale to cause the souls of kings to quake,
For here, within a smoking, bloody Hell,
Ten million risk their lives for Freedom’s sake.
And to the right a ruined village burns,
And to the left a wood its secrets hold,
But in the gutted field the plowshare turns
A grinning skull which sneers its message bold.
November 1917
College student Thomas Wolfe, too young to take part in the war.
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