Paul Fussell

Paul Fussell was born in Pasadena, California. After service with the 103rd Infantry Division in France and Germany (Bronze Star, Purple Heart), Fussell attended Pomona College and Harvard University.

Fussell's career as a university teacher began in 1951 at Connecticut College. He has taught at Rutgers University where, from 1976-83 he was John DeWitt Professor of English Literature, and at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where, from 1983-1993, he held the post of Donald T. Regan Professor of English Literature. At present, Paul Fussell is Donald T. Regan Professor Emeritus of English Literature, University of Pennsylvania.

It was Paul Fussell's passion for Eighteenth-Century literature that fired his early career. His first books are entitled: Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England, Poetic Meter and Form, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke, and, Samuel Johnson and The Life of Writing.

The second half of Fussell's career has been devoted to Twentieth-Century social and cultural history. Describing the transition, Fussell says in a recent interview: "I learned [to turn experience toward intellect and away from emotion through] my long immersion in Eighteenth-Century literature, where the urge is constantly outward from oneself; that is, not trying to undertake deep voyages into the self, but rather, to escape the self, look out at society, see what's going on, and then comment on it. Irony is a great help there, to protect oneself from the self-regarding emotion, which has always been an enemy of mine from the start."

It was during those very productive years from the mid 1970s onward that Fussell wrote the books that made him famous. The Great War and Modern Memory (1976) was the first in an impressive list of publications dealing with war and Twentieth-Century culture (Thank God for the Atom Bomb, and Other Essays, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic). The Great War and Modern Memory moreover, was awarded the National Book Award in Arts and Letters and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa. Other books by Paul Fussell include Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars, The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations, Class: A Guide through the American Status System, and Bad, or The Dumbing of America.

Since 1993, Fussell devotes his time to writing and to a busy lecturing career. In this country, Fussell has been featured recently on the CBC's "Writers and Company," "Ideas," as well as on the CBC's Harbourfront broadcasts. He and his wife, Harriette Behringer Fussell, live in Philadelphia.

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