10 great authors from the Great War
The authors are listed in order of birth. The accompanying age indicates how old the author was the day the war started, July 28, 1914. It ended on Nov. 11, 1918.
Edith Wharton (1862-1937). Born in New York City. Age 52.
In the war: Wharton was already an acclaimed novelist when the war began in 1914. Her notable works included The House of Mirth (1905) and Ethan Frome (1911).
After a divorce in 1913, she moved to France. When the war started and many became homeless, Wharton helped set up organizations that provided places to stay for French and Belgian refugees, schools for orphanages and employment opportunities for poor women.
She also opened hospitals for French soldiers with tuberculosis and wrote articles for U.S. publications to increase sympathy for the French cause.
Later: Wharton continued to garner accolades for her writing. Her book The Age of Innocence (1920) won the Pulitzer Prize for novel writing, and she was nominated (but didn’t win) the Nobel Prize in literature.
William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). Born at the British Embassy in Paris (his father was a lawyer who worked there). Age 40.
In the war: A well-known prolific writer of novels, short stories and plays before the war, Maugham joined the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, a London organization affiliated with the British Red Cross. But he didn’t stop writing. The book generally regarded as his classic, Of Human Bondage, was published in 1915.After completing the novel, Maugham joined the British Secret Intelligence Service (familiar to James Bond fans as MI6). He carried out spy missions in Switzerland and Russia, where he assisted in unsuccessful attempts to prevent the Bolshevick Revolution of 1917.
Later: After the war, Maugham added to his list of published works, one of which was The Razor’s Edge, a 1944 novel about an American pilot in World War I who tries to cope with the emotional scars left from the war.
Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Age 27.
In the war: Kilmer, a 1908 graduate of Columbia University, was one of America’s most popular writers when he joined the New York National Guard after the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. Much of his fame rested on a single poem, “Trees,” which was written in 1913 and begins, “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.” In addition to poems, Kilmer wrote essays and book reviews, worked on the staff of The New York Times, served as an editor for several publications and gave lectures on a variety of topics.Kilmer, who joined the military as a private, transferred from the National Guard to an Army infantry regiment that was shipped to France, where he was promoted to sergeant. While on a scouting mission to hunt for German machine gun sites during the Second Battle of the Marne, he was killed when a sniper shot him in the head on July 30, 1918.
Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961). Born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. Age 20.
During the war: Hammett had been working at the Pinkerton detective agency in San Francisco when he enlisted in the Army in June 1918 and became a member of the U.S. Army Ambulance Service. He did not serve overseas. Hammett, who obtained the rank of sergeant, came down with tuberculosis while stationed at Camp Meade in Maryland and received a medical discharge in May 1919.
Later: Hammett became famous for his detective novels including The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1934). Hammett also served in World War II. He joined the Army, rose to the rank of sergeant and was sent to the Aleutian Islands, where he edited the base newspaper.
Edward Estlin Cummings, commonly known as e.e. cummings (1894-1962). Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Age 19.
During the war: An aspiring poet who earned a master’s degree from Harvard University in 1916, Cummings was a pacifist but volunteered in April 1917 to serve in France with a privately formed humanitarian ambulance group, the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, affiliated with the American Red Cross. (At the end of August 1917, the U.S. Army Ambulance Service took over Norton-Harjes, which disbanded rather than come under military control, although some drivers agreed to assist the Army until mid-October 1917).In September 1917, Cummings was arrested by French authorities on treason charges after censors read his letters criticizing the war. He was held at a French military camp for three months before being released in December 1917. Cummings returned to the United States and was drafted in July 1918, but the war ended while he was still in the states.
Later: Cummings turned his experience in the French detention camp into an autobiographical novel called The Enormous Room (1922). His postwar reputation, however, was largely built on poems written in an experimental style that altered the traditional rules of grammar and word usage.
John Dos Passos (1896-1970) Born in Chicago. Age 18.
During the war: A 1916 Harvard graduate and friend of Cummings, Dos Passos went to France and joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in July 1917. When the Norton-Harjes service disbanded after being taken over by the Army, Dos Passos worked with the Red Cross ambulance service in Italy. He returned to the United States in August 1918 after being drafted and joined the U.S. Army Ambulance Service. He was back in France when the war ended.
Later: Dos Passos’ war years provided the material for his first two novels, One Man’s Initiation, 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921). His most heralded work is U.S.A., a trilogy (1930, 1932 and 1936) that follows myriad characters from the early 1900s through the start of the Great Depression.
F. Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) Born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Age 17.
During the war: Fitzgerald, hoping to make a name for himself as a novelist, entered Princeton University in September 1913 to hone his writing skills, but did poorly on other aspects of his studies and was put on academic probation. He dropped out in the spring of 1917 and joined the Army, which made him a second lieutenant in the infantry in October of that year.
In case he died in the war with his writing dreams unrealized, Fitzgerald quickly wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist and submitted the manuscript in May 1918 to a publisher, which rejected it. Fitzgerald spent time at bases in Kansas, Kentucky, Georgia and Alabama before being sent to Camp Mills in Long Island, New York, in October 1918 for transfer to Europe, but the war ended before Fitzgerald’s unit could be shipped out. Fitzgerald was discharged in February 1919.
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) Born in Madison, Wisconsin. Age 17.
During the war: After entering Oberlin College in Ohio in 1915, Wilder transferred to Yale University in 1917 but withdrew in 1918 to enlist in the military. He had poor eyesight but was accepted by the Army’s Coast Artillery Corps, which manned guns placed at the nation’s harbors to defend the coast. Wilder served for about three months as the war was coming to an end.
Later: Wilder went back to Yale and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1920, followed by a master’s in French literature from Princeton in 1926. He served in World War II from 1942 to 1945, working in the intelligence operation of what was then known as the U.S. Army Air Forces. Stationed in Italy and North Africa, he started the war as a captain and climbed to lieutenant colonel.An accomplished author of both plays and novels, Wilder won a Pulitzer Prize for novel writing with The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) and two Pulitzers for drama, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth(1942).
Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) Born in Osnabruck, Germany. Age 16.
During the war: Remarque was drafted into the German army in 1916 and was assigned to Germany’s Western Front, along the border of France and Belgium. He was severely wounded on July 31, 1917, by shrapnel that struck his neck, right arm and left leg. His wounds put Remarque in the hospital, where he remained until October 1918, just before the war ended.
Later: The first in a string of German novels by Remarque was published in 1920. His most well-known work in the English-speaking world is All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), which looks at the war through the vantage point of the soldiers in the trenches. Anti-war in tone, the book has been praised for its stark realism, descriptions of the horrors of war and eloquent writing. It is regarded by many as the best book about World War I.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) Born in Oak Park, Illinois. Age 15.
During the war: After graduating from high school in June 1917, Hemingway worked as a reporter at The Kansas City Star for several months and while there applied for a position with the Red Cross ambulance service in early 1918. He was accepted, given the rank of second lieutenant in the Red Cross, provided with a U.S. Army uniform and left the United States in May 1918 on a ship bound for Europe.
Hemingway was stationed in Italy, a U.S. ally in World War I. On July 8, he was wounded in his legs by shrapnel from a mortar shell that hit the ground near him. Hemingway went to a hospital in Milan for treatment and spent the rest of the war there before returning to the United States in January 1919.
Later: Hemingway went back to work as a journalist, primarily for the Toronto Star, while beginning his career as a writer of short stories and novels. His first novel was The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926. The next one was A Farewell to Arms (1929), whose main character, Frederic Henry, has World War I experiences similar to those of Hemingway.
Hemingway’s other major works include For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954.
Related:
100 years ago: 5 reasons World War 1 started
5 classic movies set during World War 1
Recommended:
The First World War, Prose & Poetry
