This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-odd Sonnets (The Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War)

First published in 1928, This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets is a gripping collection of narrative verse that represents the beginning and end of the promising literary career of John Allan Wyeth, a Princeton-educated French interpreter in the American Expeditionary Force's Thirty-third Division. Though it received strong reviews and enough sales to warrant a trade edition in 1929, the volume faced the insurmountable adversary of the Great Depression, and its author soon vanished from the literary scene. This new edition of This Man's Army restores to print a lost vantage point on the American experience in the Great War as valuable for its high literary merits as for its historical accuracy. The new introduction by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, chronicles the life of the elusive author and maps the book's critical reception and place in World War I poetry, while new annotations by military historian B. J. Omanson establish the historical context of individual poems.