World War I in Literature - Novels

Novels

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. Alfred Noyes is often portrayed by hostile critics as a militarist and jingoist. 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. Instead, from 1916, he did his military service on attachment to the Foreign Office, where he worked with John Buchan on propaganda. He also did his patriotic chore 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 today justly forgotten, 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.

Parade's End 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 own experience in the war, after he had enlisted at age 41.

Erich Maria Remarque's best-selling book about the First World War, Im Westen nichts Neues, was translated into 28 languages with world sales nearly reaching 4 million in 1930. and the award-winning film which was based on that work of fiction 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 ....

Some popular literary characters were put 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).