Paul Fussell (born 1924, Pasadena, California) is a cultural historian and a professor emeritus of English literature of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of books on eighteenth-century English literature, the world wars, and social class.
His father, Paul Fussell Sr., was a successful corporate lawyer in Los Angeles. His mother was born Wilhma Wilson Sill, in Indiana in 1894.
Fussell was drafted into the Army in 1943, at age 19. In October 1944 he landed in France, as part of the U.S. 103rd Infantry Division. On November 11th, he experienced his first night on the front lines. He was wounded while fighting in France as a second lieutenant. Fussell suffered from depression and rage for years following his military service. In his 1996 autobiography he associated this condition with the dehumanization of his military service and his anger at the way the United States government and popular culture romanticized warfare. Since the 1980's Fussell has been an outspoken critic of the glorification of military service and warfare.
An early influence was H. L. Mencken, but he shed Mencken as a mentor, calling him "deficient in the tragic sense", after his wartime experience. He has cultivated an elegant, witty prose style, fired by an unapologetically confrontational and subversive sensibility. His hallmark is a fierce intolerance of hypocrisy and cant, literary, cultural, and especially military.
He spent his undergraduate years at Pomona College, and earned a Ph. D. at Harvard University. He has taught at Connecticut College, Rutgers University, the University of Heidelberg, King's College London, and the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from teaching in the mid-1990s.
His classic literary study The Great War and Modern Memory(1975), is his most important work. In 1976 it won the National Book Award for Arts and Letters, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa. Military historian John Keegan calls it a "simply superb book".
His 1983 book, Class, A Guide Through the American Status System is considered to be a modern classic on the subject.
His first wife, Betty Fussell, a food writer and biographer, whom he met at Pomona College, has written a memoir, My Kitchen Wars, that discusses their more than 30 years of marriage in highly disobliging terms, including scandalous allegations regarding Fussell's personal life.
Fussell now lives in Philadelphia, with his second wife, Harriette Behringer. They met in 1983, when she sent him a postcard introducing herself, after reading an article about him. Now retired, she worked in journalism and public relations. His son, Samuel Fussell, is the author of Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder.
Works
