I never knew Paul Fussell. But when I arrived on the campus of Northeastern University in Fall 2008 to pursue graduate studies in history, my advisor made sure I got to know Doctor Fussell’s 1975 book, The Great War and Modern Memory. “If you want to write about World War I,” he said, “you’ll have to read this.”
That was my second week in graduate school. I knew that I wanted to study World War I, but that was about all I knew. I read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and Alistair Horne’s The Price of Glory when I was in high school, but if anyone had said anything new about the war since the 1960s, it wasn’t on my radar. I majored in history in college but passed on an opportunity during my senior year to take an intensive seminar course on World War I in favor of a (no-less-intensive) seminar on the history of the Boston Red Sox. (It was Spring 2005 and I stand by that decision.)
As he handed me his own marked-up copy of The Great War and Modern Memory, my advisor also lent me a little context. Fussell’s work belonged to a “wave” of histories that started hitting the market in the 1970s. “It was the cultural turn,” he explained, when the profession’s interest in statesmen and battles gave way to “war culture,” to unpacking how soldiers and civilians experienced and made sense of the war. So, Fussell, John Keegan (I’d have to read him, too), Modris Eksteins, Jay Winter, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker. “Read these,” he said, my arms now full of books, “and then we can talk.”
I’ve read a fair deal since then, and historians of the war have moved on since Fussell’s time. Fussell concerned himself mostly with great British war writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves. He argued that trench warfare shattered nineteenth century romantic ideals, clearing the way for English literature’s full-throated twentieth century embrace of irony. By the turn of the century, a new generation of scholars had taken us to the “low culture” of trench journals. Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning challenged Fussell’s central thesis. A more recent wave of scholarship led by the likes of Michelle Moyd, Richard Fogarty, and Santanu Das has woven the voices of African and Asian peasant soldiers into the tapestry, decentering Europe, putting the world back in the World War.
It will no longer do to do history as Fussell did it a half century ago.
Even so, Jay Winter calls him “one of the finest scholars of his generation.” The Modern Library counts The Great War and Modern Memory among the one hundred best nonfiction books of the twentieth century.
In 2000, having already sold 53,000 copies, Oxford University Press saw fit to publish a twenty-fifth anniversary edition.
When I sat down with Paul Fussell’s book for the first time in 2008, it was not so much what the professor said as it was how the professor said it – his ability with language; the elegance of his prose – that hit like a revelation. I didn’t know you could write history like that. His subject was ugly. His writing was beautiful. Reading that book was pure delight and pleasure.
For me, reared by the profession after the “cultural turn” had run its course, its debates long-since abated, Fussell’s prose represents his book’s most enduring legacy. Here was a professor of literature who, haunted by his own experiences in Western Europe during World War II, gave historians permission to chang the way they write about war.
The way we write about war.
If anything, that is the debt I owe, at least in part, to Doctor Fussell.
In October 2026, I walked into my local bookstore just to see if The Great War and Modern Memory could still be found on the shelves. Sure enough, there it was, fifty-one years after its initial release.
What a long and rich life Fussell’s work of history has enjoyed.
Andrew Jarboe is an associate professor of liberal arts at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches courses on World War I, gender and power in history, and transnational popular cultures. His newest book is India’s Nationalist Press and the First World War, 1914-1923: A History of the Great War (2026). He is also the author of Indian Soldiers in World War I: Race and Representation in an Imperial War (2021).
