Literature of World War I
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World War I has inspired great novels, drama and poetry. During the war itself, it has been estimated that thousands of poems were written every day by combatants and their relatives. After the war, many participants published their memoirs and diaries.
During the war many of the combatants published trench magazines, most of them for an audience in a particular division or unit. The most famous of these (and the only one still commercially available after the war) was the Wipers Times.
A common subject for fiction in the 1920s and 1930s was the effect of the war, including shell-shock and the huge social changes caused by the war.
From the latter half of the 20th century onwards, the First World War continued to be a popular subject for fiction, mainly novels.
Novels written from personal knowledge:
- Richard Aldington: Death of a Hero
- Jaroslav Hašek: The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War
- Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
- Emilio Lussu: A Year on the Plateau
- Frederic Manning: Her Privates We
- W. Somerset Maugham: Spy fiction such as Ashenden
- Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front
- Dalton Trumbo: Johnny Got His Gun
Other contemporary novels:
- John Buchan: many works including Greenmantle and The Thirty-Nine Steps
- Dorothy L. Sayers: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
- Timothy Findley: "The Wars"
Memoirs and Diaries:
- Edmund Blunden: Undertones of War
- Vera Brittain: Testament of Youth
- E. E. Cummings: The Enormous Room
- A. Stuart Dolden: Cannon Fodder
- Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That
- Ernst Jünger: Storm of Steel
- T E Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"): Seven Pillars of Wisdom
- John Masefield: published diaries
- Frank Richards: Old Soldiers Never Die
- Siegfried Sassoon: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and published diaries
- John Terraine: General Jack's Diary
- Hans Zoeberlein: Verdun (http://www.third-reich-books.com/x-590a-verdun.htm)
- Ford Madox Ford: the tetralogy Parade's End
Poetry:
- Laurence Binyon: For the Fallen
- Edmund Blunden
- Rupert Brooke
- Wilfred Wilson Gibson
- Julian Grenfell
- Ivor Gurney: Severn and Somme and War's Embers
- Francis Ledwidge
- John McCrae: In Flanders' Fields
- Wilfred Owen
- Isaac Rosenberg
- Siegfried Sassoon
- Charles Sorley
- Edward Thomas
Non-contemporary:
- Pat Barker: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road
- William Boyd: An Ice-Cream War
- J. L. Carr: A Month in the Country
- Marc Dugain: The Officers' Ward
- Byron Farwell: The Great War in Africa
- Sebastian Faulks: Birdsong
- Mark Helprin: A Soldier of the Great War
- Margaret Olwen Macmillan & Richard Holbrooke - Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
- Robert K. Massie: Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea, classic analysis of the WWI Naval battles
- Barbara W. Tuchman: The Guns of August, classic analysis of the leadup to WWI
- Barbara W. Tuchman: The Zimmermann Telegram, events leading to American involvement in WWI
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: August 1914
Frank McGuinness's 1986 play - Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme