Literature of World War I

World War I has inspired great novels, drama and poetry. During the war itself, it has been estimated that thousands of poems were written every day by combatants and their relatives. After the war, many participants published their memoirs and diaries.

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 onwards, the First World War continued to be a popular subject for fiction, mainly novels.

Novels written from personal knowledge

• Richard Aldington: Death of a Hero
• Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front
• Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
• Frederic Manning[?]: Her Privates We[?]
• Dalton Trumbo: Johnny Got His Gun
• W. Somerset Maugham: Spy fiction such as Ashenden

Other contemporary novels

• Dorothy L. Sayers: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
• John Buchan: many works including Greenmantle and The Thirty-Nine Steps

Memoirs and Diaries

• Vera Brittain: Testament of Youth
• Edmund Blunden: Undertones of War
• E. E. Cummings: The Enormous Room
• Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That
• T E Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"): The Seven Pillars of Wisdom[?]
• John Masefield: published diaries
• Siegfried Sassoon: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and published diaries

Poetry by:

• Laurence Binyon: For the Fallen
• Edmund Blunden
• Rupert Brooke
• Wilfred Wilson Gibson
• Julian Grenfell
• Ivor Gurney: Severn and Somme and War's Embers
• Francis Ledwidge
• John McCrae: In Flanders' Fields
• Wilfred Owen
• Isaac Rosenberg
• Siegfried Sassoon
• Charles Sorley
• Edward Thomas

Non-contemporary:

• Mark Helprin[?]: A Soldier of the Great War[?]
• Margaret Olwen Macmillan[?] & Richard Holbrooke[?] - Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn August 1914

• Pat Barker[?]: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road
• J L Carr[?]: A Month in the Country
• Marc Dugain[?]: The Officers' Ward
• Sebastian Faulks[?]: Birdsong
• Robert K. Massie[?]:, The Guns of August classic analysis of the leadup to WWI