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Through the Wheat (Lost American Fiction)
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Product Description
“There is no battle in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, no conflict in Stendhal’s account of Waterloo, to equal the drama and terror of Boyd’s account of Private Hicks’ advance through the wheat,” James Dickey writes in his Afterword to this new edition of a truly remarkable World War I novel.
Earlier, in 1923 on the novel’s first publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald closed his review of it with the statement that it “is not only the best combatant story of the great war but also the best war book since The Red Badge of Courage,” and was joined in his praise of the novel by such critics as Edmund Wilson.
Boyd, who fought in the war, writes in the tradition of Stephen Crane. In Private Hicks, ordinary, young, trapped by World War I, he creates the archetype of the modern warrior for whom battle holds a horror no previous soldier had to endure—the horror of technology—because of which a man may fight, suffer wounds, die, without ever seeing the face of the enemy. It is a vision of war, Dickey adds, “that is as profound as any vision of war has ever been from the tribes of the caves to the ambushes of Vietnam.” Boyd saw war as a massive, brutal rape on even the most elemental of human rights, a rape no man deserves, no mind can tolerate.
Thomas Boyd, who died in 1935 at the age of thirty-six, joined the Marines as a high school student from Defiance, Ohio. He saw action on several fronts, was gassed, and was awarded the Croix de guerre.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #2368712 in Books
- Published on: 1978-04-01
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
"A remarkable first novel."?The Nation (The Nation )
About the Author
James Dickey may well be the most widely read and respected living American poet. His major long poem, The Zodiac, was published in 1976. His only novel, Deliverance, was a critical and popular success.
Customer Reviews
America's Best World War I Novel
If asked to name a World War I novel most Americans would almost certainly say "All Quiet on the Western Front". Thanks to our rather uniform public education system, Remarque's novel has earned a place in American culture as the quintessential novel of The Great War. It deserves its reputation as a landmark of 20th century literature, but unfortunately its success contributed to the disapearance from memory of Thomas Boyd's "Through the Wheat". Without moralizing about the cost of war, Boyd brilliantly depicts its horrors and their effects on the psyche of a young American Marine. If you want to understand the Combat experience -- the noise, dirt, distraction, sweat, blood, stench of war -- this is a novel you must read. It is a tragedy that it is no longer in print.
Realistic war picture
This is a novel about what it was lke fighting in the trenches of WW I. Edmund Wilson among others thought it one of the best war novels in our literature. Boyd is a fierce realist (he was a soldier in the war, too) and pulls no punches. Death and misery are everywhere, and no one really knows what they're doing there. But Boyd is only a mediocre writer, and the realism, though praiseworthy, is not enough. The writing is flat.
A Marine's daily endurance of WWI
This is an outstanding historical and literary view of the horrors of life and death for US Marines in the "Great War". The author closely models his novel on his actual experiences with the Sixth Marines in some of the heaviest fighting by American forces in Belleau Wood, Soissons and many smaller battles. You feel the oppressive numbing fear of constant shellfire and random death, poison gas, spoiled food and the constant dirt and mud that was trench life and warfare in WWI. Lack of sleep, bad food when you could get food, and the bleak landscape of no-mans land with unburied corpses are the back drop to an excellent exploration of how men continue fighting long past their initial thoughts of patriotism and "glory" of cause. This book favorably compares and to some surpasses, Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage". This is a classic of men at war.
