Literature about World War I is generally thought to include poems, novels and drama; diaries, letters, and memoirs are often included in this category as well. Although the canon continues to be challenged, the texts most frequently taught in schools and universities are lyrics by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen; poems by Ivor Gurney, Edward Thomas, Charles Sorley, David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg are also widely anthologised. Anglophone writers, often connected to the British or US military participation in the war, and German, French and Italian all produced significant volume of works as well.
Many of the works during and about the war were written by men because of the war's intense demand on the young men of that generation; however, a number of women (especially in the British tradition) created literature about the war, often observing the effects of the war on soldiers, domestic spaces, and the home front more generally. Both fiction works like All Quiet on the Western Front and A Farewell to Arms and memoirs by authors like Ernst Jünger and Robert Graves significantly changed public perception of the war. In the post war years and middle of the 20th century, notable works about the war were also adapted into important films.
World War I continues to be a theme of historical fiction late into the 20th century, including works that received significant awards like Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy and War Horse (1982) by Michael Morpurgo. During the late 20th century and early 21st century a significant amount adaptations continued to depict the war, often based on more contemporary fiction.
General The spread of education in Britain in the decades leading up to World War I meant that British soldiers and the British public of all classes were literate. Professional and amateur authors were prolific during and after the war and found a market for their works.
Literature was produced throughout the war - with women, as well as men, feeling the 'need to record their experiences' - but it was in the late 1920s and early 1930s that Britain had a boom in publication of war literature. The next boom period was in the 1960s, when there was renewed interest in World War I during the fiftieth anniversaries and after two decades focused on World War II.
Poetry
Published poets wrote over two thousand poems about and during the war. However, only a small fraction still is known today, and several poets that were popular with contemporary readers are now obscure. An orthodox selection of poets and poems emerged during the 1960s, which often remains the standard in modern collections and distorts the impression of World War I poetry. This selection tends to emphasise the horror of war, suffering, tragedy and anger against those that wage war.
In the early weeks of the war, British poets responded with an outpouring of literary production. Rudyard Kipling's For all we have and are was syndicated extensively by newspapers in English speaking countries. Robert Bridges contributed a poem Wake Up, England! at the outbreak of war that he later wished suppressed.,Up the Line to Death, ed. Brian Gardner, 1976 John Masefield, who later succeeded Bridges as poet laureate, wrote August, 1914, a poem that was admired widely.
Wilfred Owen was killed in battle; but his poems created at the front did achieve popular attention after the war's end, e.g., Dulce Et Decorum Est, Insensibility, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility and Strange Meeting. In preparing for the publication of his collected poems, Owen tried to explain: Epic poem In Parenthesis by David Jones (artist-poet) has also been widely hailed as a masterpiece.
The poem In Flanders Fields by John McCrae continues to be one of the more popular wartime poems in Canada, and has achieved a status where it is recognised as one of the country's most notable unofficial symbols.
The expressionist poet August Stramm wrote some of Germany's important poems about the war.Ralf Schnell: Geschichte der deutschen Lyrik. Band 5: Von der Jahrhundertwende bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Reclam, Stuttgart 2013. p. 81. .
From the war itself until the late 1970s, the genre of war poetry was almost exclusively reserved for male poets. This was based on an idea of an exclusive authenticity limited to the works of those who had fought and died in the war. It excluded other forms of experience in the war, such as mourning, nursing and the home front, which were more likely to be experienced by other demographics such as women. There were over 500 women writing and publishing poetry during World War I. Examples of poems by female poets 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. In addition to giving women greater access to work, the war also gave women greater artistic freedom and space to express their identities as artists.
Novels 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 onward, World War I continued to be a popular subject for fiction, mainly novels.
Contemporary Alfred Noyes is often portrayed by hostile critics as a militarist and jingoist despite being a pacifist in life.Featherstone, Simon. War Poetry: An Introductory Reader. Routledge, 1995, pp. 28, 56-57. In 1913, when it seemed that war might yet be avoided, he published a long anti-war poem called The Wine Press. During World War I, Noyes was debarred by defective eyesight from serving at the front.Parrott, Thomas Marc and Thorp, Willard (eds). Poetry of the Transition, 1850–1914, Oxford University Press, New York, 1932, p. 500. Instead, from 1916, he did his military service on attachment to the Foreign Office, where he worked with John Buchan on propaganda.Mason, Mark. "Alfred Noyes" , Literary Heritage: West Midlands. This included work as a literary figure, writing morale-boosting short stories and exhortatory odes and lyrics recalling England's military past and asserting the morality of her cause. These works are forgotten today apart from two ghost stories, "The Lusitania Waits" and "The Log of the Evening Star", which are still occasionally reprinted in collections of tales of the uncanny.
Im Westen nichts Neues ("All Quiet on the Western Front"), Erich Maria Remarque's best-selling book about World War I, was translated into 28 languages with world sales nearly reaching 4 million in 1930. The work of fiction, and the award-winning film adaptation have had a greater influence in shaping public views of the war than the work of any historian. John Galsworthy's perspective was quite different in 1915 when he wrote Those of us who are able to look back from thirty years hence on this tornado of death — will conclude with a dreadful laugh that if it had never come, the state of the world would be very much the same. It is not the intention of these words to deny the desperate importance of this conflict now that it has been joined ...Galsworthy, John. "Art and the War" in Atlantic Monthly, p. 267.
Remarque's book was partly based on Henri Barbusse's 1916 novel Under Fire. Barbusse was a French journalist who served as a stretcher-bearer on the front lines, and his book was very influential in its own right at the time. By the end of the war, it had sold almost 250,000 copies and read by servicemen of many nations.
American novelist, John Dos Passos, was a volunteer ambulance driver during the war. He wrote his first novel, the anti-war One Man's Initiation: 1917, in the trenches (later published in 1920.) The book was reprinted in 1945, under the title First Encounter. His postwar war novel, Three Soldiers, brought him fame and critical recognition.
British novelist Mary Augusta Ward wrote generally pro-war novels, some at the request of United States President Theodore Roosevelt, which nevertheless raised questions about the war. These include England's Effort (1916), Towards the Goal (1917), Missing (1917), The War and Elizabeth (1917) and Fields of Victory (1919).
Some pre-existing popular literary characters were placed by their authors in World War I-related adventures during or directly after the war. These include Tom Swift (Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship in 1915 and Tom Swift and His Air Scout in 1919), Sherlock Holmes (His Last Bow, 1917) and Tarzan (Tarzan the Untamed, 1920).
Post-war A.P. Herbert was one of the first combatants to publish a novel about the war, The Secret Battle (1919). This was followed in subsequent years by others, including Through the Wheat (1923) by Thomas Alexander Boyd, the "Spanish Farm Trilogy"—Sixty-Four (1925), Ninety-Four (1925) and The Crime at Vanderlynden's (1926)—by Ralph Hale Mottram, Death of a Hero (1929) by Richard Aldington, The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929) by Frederic Manning, The Patriot's Progress (1930) by Henry Williamson, Generals Die in Bed by Charles Yale Harrison (1930) and Winged Victory (1934) by Victor Maslin Yeates.
Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford was a highly acclaimed tetralogy of novels, published between 1924 and 1927, that covers the events of World War I and the years around it from the viewpoint of a government statistician who becomes an officer in the British Army during the war. The novels were based on Ford's experience in the war after he had enlisted at the age of 41.
Willa Cather wrote One of Ours in 1922, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her novel that tells the story of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska farmer who escapes a loveless marriage to fight in the War. Critics like H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis panned the book, mostly because it romanticised war. Cather based Claude Wheeler on her cousin G.P. Cather, who was killed in 1918 at the Battle of Cantigny in France.
May Sinclair volunteered with the Munro Ambulance Corps in 1914 and published her account of the front in Belgium as A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915). She followed this with three novels about the war, Tasker Jevons (1916), The Tree of Heaven (1917) and The Romantic (1920). Journalist Evadne Price wrote a semi-biographical novel Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War (1930) about ambulance drivers based on women she had interviewed.
W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928), a collection of short stories, was based on the author's experience with British Intelligence during the war. It was loosely adapted into the film Secret Agent (1936), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and a 1991 BBC TV series.
German author Hans Herbert Grimm wrote a novel Schlump in 1928 which was published anonymously due to its satirical and anti-war tone, loosely based on the author's experiences as a military policeman in German-occupied France during WW1. The novel was banned by the Nazis in 1933 and Grimm was not credited as the author until 2013.
British novelist W.F. Morris wrote two mystery novels set in the Great War- 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. The book, published in 1929, is a first-person account of an American, Frederic Henry, serving as a lieutenant ("Tenente") in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The novel is about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the war, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of A Farewell to Arms cemented Hemingway's stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as "the premier American war novel from that debacle World War I."