Books and writings about World War I usually include poems, novels, and plays. Diaries, letters, and personal stories are also part of this group. Although the list of important works is sometimes questioned, the texts most often taught in schools and colleges include poems by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Poems by Ivor Gurney, Edward Thomas, Charles Sorley, David Jones, and Isaac Rosenberg are also frequently included in collections. Many writings about the war were created by men because many young men were needed for the war effort. However, some women, especially in the British tradition, also wrote about the war. Their works often focused on how the war affected soldiers, homes, and life on the home front.

General

The spread of education in Britain before World War I helped many British soldiers and people from all classes learn to read and write. Both professional and amateur writers created many books during and after the war, and there was a market for their works.

Books were written throughout the war, with both men and women wanting to share their experiences. However, the greatest increase in war-related books happened in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Another increase occurred in the 1960s, when people became more interested in World War I during its 50th anniversary and after two decades that focused on World War II.

Poetry

Published poets wrote more than 2,000 poems about and during the war. However, only a small number are still known today, and some poets who were once popular are now forgotten. A commonly accepted group of poets and poems became popular during the 1960s. This group often remains the standard in modern collections and changes how people see World War I poetry. This selection usually focuses on the horror of war, suffering, tragedy, and anger toward those who start wars.

In the early weeks of the war, British poets created many poems. Rudyard Kipling’s poem For all we have and are was widely shared in newspapers across English-speaking countries. Robert Bridges wrote a poem titled Wake Up, England! when the war began, but he later wanted it to be removed. John Masefield, who later became poet laureate, wrote August, 1914, a poem that was widely admired.

Wilfred Owen was killed in battle, but the poems he wrote at the front gained attention after the war ended. Examples include Dulce Et Decorum Est, Insensibility, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility, and Strange Meeting. Before publishing his collected poems, Owen tried to explain his work.

The epic poem In Parenthesis by David Jones (an artist and poet) is also widely praised as a masterpiece.

The poem In Flanders Fields by John McCrae remains one of the most popular wartime poems in Canada. It is recognized as one of the country’s most notable unofficial symbols.

The expressionist poet August Stramm wrote important poems about the war in Germany.

From the start of the war until the late 1970s, war poetry was mostly written by men. This was based on the belief that only those who fought and died in the war could write authentically about it. This idea ignored other experiences of the war, such as mourning, nursing, and life on the home front, which were more common among groups like women. More than 500 women wrote and published poems during World War I. Examples include Teresa Hooley’s A War Film, Jessie Pope’s War Girls, Pauline B. Barrington’s Education, and Mary H.J. Henderson’s An Incident. The war also gave women more opportunities to work and greater freedom to express their artistic identities.

Novels

During the 1920s and 1930s, many fictional stories focused on the effects of war, such as shell shock and the major changes in society caused by war. From the second half of the 20th century, World War I remained a common topic in fiction, especially in novels.

Alfred Noyes was often criticized by some writers as being supportive of war and national pride, even though he was a pacifist. In 1913, before war seemed certain, he wrote a long poem called The Wine Press that opposed war. Because of poor eyesight, Noyes could not serve on the front lines during World War I. Instead, he worked for the Foreign Office from 1916, helping create propaganda with John Buchan. His job included writing stories and poems that encouraged people and reminded them of England’s military history and the rightness of its cause. Most of these works are no longer remembered, except for two ghost stories, The Lusitania Waits and The Log of the Evening Star, which are sometimes reprinted.

Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), a popular book by Erich Maria Remarque about World War I, was translated into 28 languages and sold nearly 4 million copies by 1930. This book and its film adaptation had a greater influence on public views of the war than any historian’s work. In 1915, John Galsworthy had a different perspective on the war.

Remarque’s book was partly inspired by Henri Barbusse’s 1916 novel Under Fire. Barbusse was a French journalist who worked as a stretcher-bearer on the front lines, and his book was very influential at the time. By the end of the war, it had sold almost 250,000 copies and was read by soldiers from many countries.

American writer John Dos Passos volunteered as an ambulance driver during the war. He wrote his first novel, the anti-war One Man’s Initiation: 1917, while in the trenches (published in 1920). The book was reprinted in 1945 as First Encounter. His postwar novel Three Soldiers made him famous and earned praise from critics.

British writer Mary Augusta Ward wrote novels that supported the war, some at the request of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. These books, including England’s Effort (1916) and Fields of Victory (1919), raised questions about the war.

Some popular characters from earlier books were placed in World War I stories during or after the war. These include Tom Swift (Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship, 1915 and Tom Swift and His Air Scout, 1919), Sherlock Holmes (His Last Bow, 1917), and Tarzan (Tarzan the Untamed, 1920).

A.P. Herbert was one of the first people to write a novel about the war, The Secret Battle (1919). Other books followed, such as Through the Wheat (1923) by Thomas Alexander Boyd and Death of a Hero (1929) by Richard Aldington.

Parade’s End, a series of four novels by Ford Madox Ford published between 1924 and 1927, describes World War I and the years around it from the perspective of a government statistician who becomes an officer in the British Army. Ford based the story on his own wartime experiences after joining the army at age 41.

Willa Cather wrote One of Ours in 1922, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. The novel follows Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska farmer who leaves his unhappy marriage to fight in the war. Critics like H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis criticized the book for romanticizing war. Cather based the character on her cousin, G.P. Cather, who died in 1918 during the Battle of Cantigny in France.

May Sinclair volunteered with the Munro Ambulance Corps in 1914 and wrote A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915) about her experiences. She later wrote three novels about the war: Tasker Jevons (1916), The Tree of Heaven (1917), and The Romantic (1920). Journalist Evadne Price wrote Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War (1930), a semi-biographical novel about ambulance drivers based on interviews.

W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928), a collection of short stories, was based on his work with British Intelligence during the war. It was adapted into the film Secret Agent (1936) by Alfred Hitchcock and a 1991 BBC TV series.

German writer Hans Herbert Grimm wrote Schlump (1928), an anonymous novel with anti-war themes based on his experiences as a military policeman in German-occupied France during World War I. The book was banned by the Nazis in 1933, and Grimm was not credited as the author until 2013.

British writer W.F. Morris wrote two mystery novels set in World War I: Bretherton (1929) and Behind the Lines (1930). Morris served in the British Army during the war.

A Farewell to Arms is a novel by Ernest Hemingway set during the Italian campaign of World War I. Published in 1929, it tells the story of American Frederic Henry, who serves in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The novel describes a love affair between Henry and Catherine Barkley, set against the backdrop of war, cynical soldiers, and displaced people. The book helped establish Hemingway as a major American writer and became his first bestseller.

The characters Biggles and Bulldog Drummond were created by war veterans W.E. Johns and H.C. McNeile, respectively. Both characters shared some of their creators’ wartime experiences. The Bulldog Drummond books were popular among veterans after the war. Writers like Paul Fussell and Janet S.K. Watson have questioned how memories of war influence historical understanding.

French writer Gabriel Chevallier, who served as an infantryman on the Western Front, wrote Fear (1930), based on his wartime experiences. The novel was not published in English until 2011.

Although best known for his Hornblower series about the Napoleonic Wars, C.S. Forester also wrote three novels set in World War I. Only one, The General (1936), was set on the Western Front. Another, The African Queen (1935), was set in German East Africa and later made into a film. A source claims Adolf Hitler admired The General in the late 193

Memoirs

Captain John Hay Beith’s The First Hundred Thousand, a very popular book about life in the army, was published in 1915 and became one of the most popular books of that time. It was translated into French as Les Premiers Cent Mille. Because the book was so popular in the United States, which was not involved in the war at that time, Beith was moved to work with the British War Mission in Washington, D.C.

During the war, memoirs written by several famous skilled pilots were published. These included Winged Warfare (1918) by Canadian William Bishop, Flying Fury (1918) by English pilot James McCudden, and The Red Fighter Pilot (1917) by Manfred von Richthofen. Both McCudden and von Richthofen were killed in battle after writing their books.

After the war, many soldiers and others who fought wrote about their experiences. One of the first books was Storm of Steel (1920) by German writer Ernst Jünger, which described his time as an officer on the Western Front. The first books written by Allied soldiers were published in 1922, soon after the war ended: A Tank Driver’s Experiences by Arthur Jenkins and Disenchantment by Charles Edward Montague. Soon after, other books were published, including Undertones of War (1928) by Edmund Blunden, Good-Bye to All That (1929) by Robert Graves, A Subaltern’s War (1929) by Charles Edmund Carrington, A Passionate Prodigality (1933) by Guy Chapman, and Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) by Percy Wyndham Lewis. Books about pilots included Wind in the Wires (1933) by Duncan Grinnell-Milne, Wings of War (1933) by Rudolf Stark, and Sagittarius Rising (1936) by Cecil Arthur Lewis. Nurses also wrote about their wartime experiences, such as A Diary without Dates (1918) by Enid Bagnold, Forbidden Zone (1929) by Mary Borden, Testament of Youth (1933) by Vera Brittain, and We That Were Young (1932) by Irene Rathbone.

Some books about World War I were not published until the late 20th century or later. This happened because the authors wrote them later in life or chose not to publish them at first. One example is Poilu by French writer Louis Barthas, a book about his time as a soldier in the French army on the Western Front. It was written shortly after the war but was not published until 1978, after the author died in 1952.

British World War I veteran George Coppard wrote his memoir With a Machine-Gun to Cambrai in 1968. Former airman Arthur Gould Lee also wrote his memoir No Parachute in the same year.

The memoir Somme Mud was written in the 1920s but was not published until 2006, more than 20 years after the author, Australian Edward Francis Lynch, died. Lynch fought with the Australian Imperial Force in France from 1916 to 1918.

The book The Burning of the World, first published in 2014, is a memoir about World War I on the Eastern Front. It was written by Hungarian artist and writer Bela Zombory-Moldovan, who joined the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1914 at the age of 29.

Theatre

Plays about World War I are listed below:

• Journey's End (1928), by R. C. Sherriff
• The Silver Tassie (1928), by Sean O'Casey
• Post-Mortem (1930), by Noël Coward
• For Services Rendered (1932), by Somerset Maugham
• The One Day of the Year (1958), by Alan Seymour
• Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963), by Joan Littlewood
• The Accrington Pals (1982), by Peter Whelan
• Not About Heroes (1982), by Stephen MacDonald
• Once on Chunuk Bair (1982), by Maurice Shadbolt
• Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), by Frank McGuinness
• My Boy Jack (1997), by David Haig
• An August Bank Holiday Lark (2014), by Deborah McAndrew
• Anzac Eve (2017), by Dave Armstrong

French literature on WWI

• Le Feu : journal d'une escouade / Henri Barbusse
• La Percée : roman d'un fantassin (1914-1915) / Jean Bernier
• L'Appel du sol / Adrien Bertrand
• Voyage au bout de la nuit / Louis Ferdinand Céline
• La Peur / Gabriel Chevallier
• Les Poilus / Joseph Delteil
• Les Croix de Bois / Roland Dorgelès
• Ceux de 14 / Maurice Genevoix
• Solitude de la Pitié / Jean Giono
• Le Grand troupeau / Jean Giono
• Les Silences du colonel Bramble; suivi des Discours et nouveaux discours du Docteur O'Grady / André Maurois
• Capitaine Conan / Roger Vercel
• Clavel soldat / Léon Werth

• La Sentinelle tranquille sous la lune / Soazig Aaron
• Les Beaux quartiers / Louis Aragon
• La Maison rose / Pierre Bergounioux
• Comme le temps passe / Robert Brasillach
• Les Ames grises / Philippe Claudel
• Meuse l'oubli / Philippe Claudel
• Les Roses de Verdun / Bernard Clavel
• Thomas l'imposteur / Jean Cocteau
• Le Der des ders / Didier Daeninckx
• La Comédie de Charleroi / Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
• La Chambre des officiers / Marc Dugain
• Le Monument :