What Do I Read Next?
- For a better sense of the “Lost Generation” as well as the general disillusionment brought about by the aftermath of World War I see Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). The novel is also the first depiction of the American expatriates living in Paris.
- A view of America in World War I is given in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. The novel itself concerns a family saga, but the middle of the work was made into a movie starring James Dean. That 1954 film, East of Eden, focuses on Steinbeck’s portrayal of the impact of the war on a small community—from the power of draft boards, to the morality of profiteering from war.
- Another view of World War I was also published early in 1929 from the perspective of a German soldier. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was also a great success and found its way onto film. The idea that someone else had published on the same topic—the First World War—months before his book came out alarmed Hemingway but did not affect his sales.
- Indispensible to an understanding of the impact and the horror of the First World War, especially to Europeans, is a reading of the poetry written on the front lines and in a general response to the war. The horror of war was illustrated in ground breaking poetry by such authors as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and others. Some of their poetry and other poems on World War I can be found in recently republished collections, such as World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenburg, and Others, collected by Candace Ward and printed by Dover in 1997.
- If you want to read more about Ernest Hemingway Jeffrey Meyers’s Hemingway: A Biography, published in 1985, offers a thorough account of Hemingway's life.
- For a simple overview of World War I, see James L. Stokesbury’s A Short History of World War I, published in 1981.
- A more technical insight into the growing sophistication of weaponry and the role of the ambulance in the war can be found in John S. Haller’s From Farcarts to Fords, A History of the Military Ambulance, 1790-1925, published in 1992.
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