Other editions of book Through the Wheat: A Novel: A Library of America eBook Classic

A neglected classic offers an unflinching depiction of the physical and psychological cost of modern warfare.For his 1923 novel Through the Wheat Thomas Boyd drew on his own experiences with the Marines at Belleau Wood, Soissons, and St. Mihiel to tell the story of William Hicks, an infantryman fighting in France in 1918. Hicks endures hunger, thirst, cold, heat, and fatigue as his platoon advances through dense woods and open fields in the face of hidden machine guns and sudden artillery bombardments, experiencing alternating states of fear, nausea, fury, and apathy until he becomes “impervious to the demands of the dead and the living.” When it was first published, Through the Wheat was hailed by F. Scott Fitzgerald as “the best war book since The Red Badge of Courage,” and by Edmund Wilson as “probably the most authentic novel yet written by an American about war”; fifty years later, James Dickey praised it as “a war book of the most striking and moving kind.”

Fresh out of a Defiance, Ohio, high school, Thomas Boyd (1898–1935) joined the Marines to serve his country in the patriotic heat of the spring of 1917. In 1919 he came home from the war with a Croix de Guerre and a desire to write. He joined the St. Paul News as a journalist and opened a bookstore, whose patrons included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. Through the Wheat appeared to immediate acclaim, with F. Scott Fitzgerald calling it "a work of art" and "arresting." Boyd wrote five other works before he died in Vermont of a cerebral hemorrhage at age thirty-seven.

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Excerpt from Through the WheatUsk, like soft blue smoke, fell with the dying spring air and settled upon the northern French village. In the uncertain light one and two story buildings set along the crooked street showed crisply, bearing a resem blance to false teeth in an ash-old face. To young Hicks, disconsolate as he leaned against the outer wall of the French canteen, upon whose smooth white surface his body made an unseemly blot, life was worth very little.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

“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.

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Fresh out of a Defiance, Ohio, high school, Thomas Boyd (1898-1935) joined the Marines to serve his country in the patriotic heat of the spring of 1917. In 1919 he came home from the war with a Croix de Guerre and a desire to write. He joined the St. Paul News as a journalist and opened a bookstore, whose patrons included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. Through the Wheat appeared to immediate acclaim, with F. Scott Fitzgerald calling it "a work of art" and "arresting." Boyd wrote five other works before he died in Vermont of a cerebral hemorrhage at age thirty-seven.