Paul Fussell

From Freepedia

Paul Fussell (born 1924, Pasadena, California) is a cultural historian and a professor emeritus of English literature of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of books on eighteenth-century English literature, the world wars, and social class.

His father, Paul Fussell Sr., was a successful corporate lawyer in Los Angeles. His mother was born Wilhma Wilson Sill, in Indiana in 1894. His paternal grandmother was also a presence in his childhood; on Sundays the family trooped off to church and then to Sunday dinner together.

Fussell was drafted into the Army in 1943, at age 19. In October 1944 he landed in France, as part of the U.S. 103rd Infantry Division. On November 11th, he experienced his first night on the front lines. 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, calling him "deficient in the tragic sense", after his wartime experience. He has cultivated an elegant, witty prose style, fired by an unapologetically confrontational and subversive sensibility. His hallmark is a fierce intolerance of hypocrisy and cant, literary, cultural, and especially military.

He spent his undergraduate years at Pomona College, and earned a Ph. D. at Harvard University. He has taught at Connecticut College, Rutgers University, the University of Heidelberg, King's College, London, and the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from teaching in the mid-1990s.

His classic literary study The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), is his most important work. In 1976 it won the National Book Award for Arts and Letters, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa. Military historian John Keegan calls it a "simply superb book".

His first wife, Betty, a food writer and biographer, whom he met at Pomona College, has written a memoir, "My Kitchen Wars", that discusses their more than 30 years of marriage.

Fussell now lives in Philadelphia, with his second wife, Harriette Behringer. They met in 1983, when she sent him a postcard introducing herself, after reading an article about him. Now retired, she worked in journalism and public relations. His son, Samuel Fussell, is the author of Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder.

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 (2003)

External links

• Brief biography
• Guardian profile