World War I Collection Spotlight - Classics

1) Reflections of a nonpolitical man

Author

Mann, Thomas

Series

New York Review Books classics

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

Click to view

"When World War I broke out the author of ''Buddenbrooks'' was almost 40 but not yet in the public view one of the giants of European literature. In his native Germany it was thought that Gerhart Hauptmann and probably a few of his elder contemporaries were towering above him. But he already had a reputation as one of the most interesting writers in Europe and as a moralist from whom his many readers expected a message in a time of great trials. His...

2) Private notebooks: 1914-1916

Author

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Description

Click to view

"Written in code under constant threat of battle, Wittgenstein's searing and illuminating diaries finally emerge in this first-ever English translation. During the pandemic, Marjorie Perloff, one of our foremost scholars of global literature, found her mind ineluctably drawn to the profound commentary on life and death in the wartime diaries of eminent philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Upon learning that these notebooks, which richly contextualize...

3) The enormous room

Author

Cummings, E. E

Series

New York Review Books classics

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

Click to view

"In 1917, after the entry of America into World War I, E. E. Cummings, arecent graduate of Harvard College, volunteered to serve on an ambulance corps in France. Arrived in Paris with a new friend, William Slater Brown, the two young men set about living it up in the big city before heading off to their assignment. Once in the field, they wrote irreverent letters about their experiences which attracted the attention of the censors and ultimately led...

4) The last days of mankind: the complete text

Author

Kraus, Karl

Series

Margellos world republic of letters book

5) Wings

Formats:

DVD, eVideo

Description

Click to view

Two young men, one rich, one middle class, who are in love with the same woman (Hollywood's first "It-girl," Clara Bow), become fighter pilots in World War I. Stunningly realistic flying sequences, all filmed without faking or processing shots, highlight this story of two airmen pals and an ambulance nurse they both love, first winner of an **Academy Award** for Best Picture. Winner of Best Picture and Best Effects, Engineering Effects at the **Academy...

6) Three soldiers

Author

Dos Passos, John

Description

Click to view

John Dos Passos wrote one of the most grimly honest portraits of World War I. Three Soldiers portrays the lives of a trio of army privates: Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco; Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana; and Andrews, a musically gifted Harvard graduate from New York. Hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication in 1921, Three Soldiers is a gripping exploration of fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion,...

7) The thirty-nine steps

Author

Buchan, John

Series

Richard Hannay adventures volume 1

Formats:

Book, eBook

Description

Click to view

Richard Hannay returned to England, after making his fortune in South Africa, is unwillingly ensnared in a tortured plot to assassinate Karolides the Greek premier and so plunge Europe into war. Scudder, an American journalist turned spy has coded information relating to the plot but is murdered in Hannay's luxurious flat before he can pass on the code. Hannay, with all fingers pointing to him as the murderer escapes by Scottish express and with Scudder's...

8) Testament of youth: an autobiographical study of the years 1900-1925

Author

Brittain, Vera

9) South Riding: an English landscape

Author

Holtby, Winifred

Description

Click to view

After the death of her fiancé, an ambitious young woman returns home to a depressed, post-World War I Yorkshire village to become headmistress of the local girls' school.

10) A soldier on the southern front: the classic Italian memoir of World War I

Author

Lussu, Emilio

Description

Click to view

A rediscovered Italian masterpiece chronicling the author's experience as an infantryman, newly translated and reissued to commemorate the centennial of World War I. Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JŸnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu's memoir is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals, in spare and...

11) A Scots quair

Author

Gibbon, Lewis Grassic

12) Schlump

Author

Grimm, Hans Herbert

Series

New York Review of Books Classics

Description

Click to view

"Seventeen-year-old Schlump marches off to war in 1915 because going to war is the best way to meet girls. And so he does, on his first posting, overseeing three villages in occupied France. But then Schlump is sent to the front, and the good times end. Schlump, which was published anonymously in 1928 and widely translated at the time, was one of the first German novels to describe World War I in all its horror and absurdity and it remains one of...

13) Rilla of Ingleside

Author

Montgomery, L. M. (Lucy Maud)

Series

Anne of Green Gables volume 8

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook

Description

Click to view

Fifteen-year-old Rilla, the daughter of Anne Shirley Blythe, grows from a carefree, irresponsible girl into a strong and capable young woman during war years, 1914-1918.

14) Regeneration

Author

Barker, Pat

Series

Regeneration trilogy (Pat Barker) volume 1

Description

Click to view

Set in a British military hospital during WWI, this novel blends fact and fiction, drawing its two protagonists from the pages of history. The author of Union Street (made into the film Stanley and Iris) portrays overwhelmed men who try to come to terms with their outrage of a futile war.

15) Poilu: the World War I notebooks of Louis Barthas, barrelmaker, 1914-1918

Author

Barthas, Louis

Description

Click to view

"Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceaseless combat, wherever the French army fought its fiercest battles: Artois, Flanders, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, the Argonne. Barthas' riveting wartime narrative, first published in France in 1978,...

16) Poems of Rupert Brooke

Author

Brooke, Rupert

17) Sergeant York

Description

Click to view

Story of a boy drafted into the military who begins his career as a pacifist and then soon sees the justification for fighting.

18) Paths of glory

Series

Criterion collection volume 538

Description

Click to view

During WWI, a French battalion is ordered on a suicide mission that is likely to fail. When it does, the general that planned the mission selects three soldiers from the battalion to be executed for cowardice, and selects their leader as their attorney.

19) Parade's end

Author

Ford, Ford Madox

Series

Parade's end

Description

Click to view

"First published as four separate novels, Parade's End explores the world of the English ruling class as it descends into the chaos of war. Christopher Tietjens is an officer from a wealthy family who finds himself torn between his unfaithful socialite wife, Sylvia, and his suffragette mistress, Valentine."--P. [4] of cover.

20) One of ours

Author

Cather, Willa

Series

Vintage classics

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook

Description

Click to view

Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with...