All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books

The Great War and Modern Memory

In The Great War and Modern Memory, published in 1975, distinguished military historian Paul Fussell makes the case not just that World War I is the first modern war and that it has informed how we think about armed conflict ever since (both of which are true) but that on a more existential level it fundamentally altered humanity’s view of itself and the world. In this astonishingly wide-ranging survey (incorporating military studies, political science, literary criticism and social theory), Fussell examines the works of several classic World War I writers, including Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, demonstrating that their influence on the generations that followed has so permeated our worldview — including our comfort with irony, dislocation, dichotomy and alienation, not to mention our distrust of institutions and authority, as well as our absolute assumption that we live in a postlapsarian world — that today even those who have never read these writers (let alone heard of them) have been touched by the legacy of World War I.

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