Paul Fussell
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Paul Fussell (born 1924, Pasadena, California) is a cultural historian, professor emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, and author of books on eighteenth-century English literature, World War II, and social class.
Fussell was called up in 1943, and is a combat infantry veteran of the European campaign: he was wounded while fighting in France as a second lieutenant.
An early influence was H. L. Mencken, but he shed Mencken as a mentor when faced with the wartime experience. He has cultivated an unapologetically difficult personal and writing style.
Works
- The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations (1959)
- Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965)
- The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (1965)
- Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (1966)
- Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1969) editor with Geoffrey Tillotson and Marshall Waingrow
- Samuel Johnson: The Life of Writing (1971)
- English Augustan Poetry (1972)
- The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
- The Ordeal of Alfred M. Hale: The Memoirs of a Soldier Servant (1975) editor
- Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980)
- Sassoon's Long Journey (1983) editor, from The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston
- Class, A Guide Through the American Status System (1983)
- Caste Marks: Style and Status in the USA (1984)
- The Norton Book of Travel (1987) editor
- Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (1988)
- Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989)
- BAD: or, The Dumbing of America (1991)
- The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War (1991)
- The Norton Book of Modern War (1991) editor
- The Anti-Egotist. Kingsley Amis: Man of Letters (1994)
- Doing Battle - The Making of a Skeptic (1996) autobiography
- Uniforms : Why We Are What We Wear (2002)
- The Boys’ Crusade : The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 (2004)
External links
- Brief biography (http://www.stfx.ca/pinstitutes/bronfman/paulfussellbiography.htm)
- Guardian profile (http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/history/story/0,6000,1272911,00.html)