
Paul Fussell, the acclaimed literary scholar and World War II veteran best known for his pioneering book The Great War and Modern Memory (1976), died May 23. Fussell, who was severely wounded in France in 1944, died of natural causes at age 88.
The Great War in Modern Memory, which received the National Book Award, was listed as No. 75 on the Modern Library’s list of the greatest nonfiction books of the 20th century. In it, Fussell examines World War I through the cultural lens of how it was perceived during and after the fighting. His explication of the vast differences between romanticized versions of the war after it was over and the shocking brutality of the actual war itself strongly influenced how historians and other scholars have studied all wars, including the Vietnam War.
“It is difficult to underestimate Fussell’s influence,” Vincent B. Sherry wrote in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. “The book’s ambition and popularity move interpretation of the war from a relatively minor literary and historical specialization to a much more widespread cultural concern. His claims for the meaning of the war are profound and far-reaching; indeed, some have found them hyperbolic. Yet, whether in spite of or because of the enormity of his assertions, Fussell has set the agenda for most of the criticism that has followed him.”

Paul Fussell Jr. grew up in Pasadena, Calif., and was drafted into the Army in 1943 while he was a student at Pomona College. He missed D-Day, but 2o-year-old Lt. Fussell experienced the war at its worst. He served as a 7th Army rifle platoon leader in southwestern France from November 1944 until six months later when Fussell was wounded as many of his men lay dying around him. He never got over it.
Fussell wrote two books about his World War II service, The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-45 (2003), and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (1996). The journalist Russell Baker called the latter “a wonderfully angry” book. In it, Fussell describes how he was wrenched from an ideal childhood and young adulthood into the Army and into the maw of war in France.
Fussell witnessed the horror of war up close. That experience, along with his brief post-war time in the Army, shaped the rest of Fussell’s life. It led him, among other things, to persue a life of the mind as a college English professor, prolific essayist, and world traveler.
In the book Fussell provides many insights into the Human Condition, primarily in relation to society and politics in the United States following World War II. Fussell also reprises one theme of The Great War in Modern Memory as he describes how he tried to come to grips with why war is romanticized by those who did not do the fighting and dying.

Posted on May 24th 2012 in Essays, Obituaries