American Writers and World War I

Recent scholarship has uncovered a spectrum of sociopolitical categories of World War I experience represented in American literature. American Writers and World War I resituates this collective focus on the multifaceted nature of war experience, by considering writers as idiosyncratic individuals—rather than as members of a particular constituency of identity. Looking at texts produced throughout the careers of Edith Wharton, Ellen La Motte, Mary Borden, Thomas Boyd, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Laurence Stallings, and Ernest Hemingway, David Rennie argues that authors’ war writing continuously evolved in response to the unfolding developments of their careers and personalities. War writing was implicated in, and influenced by, wider cultural forces such as governmental censorship, the publishing business, advertising, and the Hollywood film industry. Studying the lives of individual authors and the environments in which they worked reveals that writers did not demonstrate static, unvarying attitudes to the war, and that their depictions of it were repeatedly shaped by the practicalities of authorship. Rennie discusses the importance of American cultural and literary precedents, which offered writers means of assessing the war, and argues that even authors’ hallmark “anti-war” works are in fact characterized by an awareness of the war’s nuanced effects on society and individuals.