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

Biography

Jean Moorcroft Wilson is Lecturer in English at London University. She has published widely, including biographies of Virginia Woolf, Isaac Rosenberg, Charles Hamilton Sorley and William Watson. She is currently writing the second volume of the Sassoon biography.

"One might imagine that Sassoon himself used up all his own best biographical material. But this turns out not to be the case...This first volume raises contradictions that cannot be resolved until the publication of the second. I'm hooked." -- The Ottowa Citizen
"For his generation, the poetry and career of Siegfried Sassoon were emblamatic of the ways in which the secure truths of Western civilization were destroyed in the hopeless foxholes of the First World War. It is difficult to imagine the works of Virginia Woolf or Hemingway or Faulkner existing without [those of Sassoon]. Wilson's fine biography [is] a thorough, compassionate, and well-documented portrait of Sassoon's life...Splendid [and] essential." -- The Boston Phoenix
"[V]aluable for its depth of documentation and as a resource for the growing number of Pat Barker fans on these shores." -- Publishers Weekly
"Sympathetic and thoroughly researched...Wilson's biography makes a determined bid at being not only Sassoon's first, but also, in its detail, his definitive one." -- Kirkus Reviews
"An engrossing study highly recommended for both the general and the scholarly reader at any level." -- Choice
"Promises to be the definitive biography... compassionate as well as critical." -- Robert Nye, The Scotsman
"Thorough and perceptive... the author seems at home on the Western Front, in literary salons and on the hunting field." -- Jeremy Lewis, The Observer
"Her mastery of detail is impressive." -- Mark Bostridge, The Independent on Sunday
"Wilson's two volumes are an archive, not a literary biography...Sassoon's vault from the romantic field-and stream lyrics of the Georgian poets to subversive messenger from Hell is essential reading." -- Los Angeles Times