Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet, A biography (1886-1918)

This biography appears in the midst of a small Sassoon revival. Although not the sprightliest of writers, Jean Moorcroft Wilson gives a comprehensive and well-rounded impression of Sassoon, drawing on much new material, including both sides of his correspondence with T.E. Lawrence. "Unlike the many writers who lead sedentary lives," Wilson notes, "[Sassoon] was a man of action caught up in the bloodiest conflict in history." In the early 1920s, still glowing from the success of his poems of the First World War, Sassoon had imagined he would write a "Madame Bovary dealing with sexual inversion." But the poet who patrolled no man's land at night and whose initially romantic verses gradually came to encompass all the horrors of trench warfare could not find the courage to declare his love for men. One of the benefits of this late biography, as Wilson points out, is that she can now write openly of what Sassoon could not. --Regina Marler