Thomas Boyd – författare

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.

A masterwork of World War I short stories portraying the experiences of Marines in battle.   Points of Honor: Short Stories of the Great War by a US Combat Marine is based on author Thomas Alexander Boyd’s personal experiences as an enlisted Marine. First published in 1925 and long out of print, this edition rescues from obscurity a vivid, kaleidoscopic vision of American soldiers, US Marines mostly, serving in a global conflict a century ago. It is a true forgotten masterpiece of World War I literature.   The stories in Points of Honor deal almost entirely with Marines in the midst of battle—or faced with the consequences of military violence. The eleven stories in this collection offer a panoramic view of war experience and its aftermath, what Boyd described as “a mass of more human happenings.” The themes are often antiheroic: dehumanization, pettiness, betrayal by loved ones at home, and the cruelty of military justice. But Boyd’s vision also accommodates courage and loyalty. Like all great works of war literature, this collection underscores the central paradox of armed conflict—its ability to bring out both the best and worst in human beings.   This reissue of Points of Honor is edited, annotated, and introduced by Steven Trout. Trout provides an overview of Thomas Boyd’s war experience and writing career and situates the stories within the broader context of World War I American literature.   Points of Honor received strong reviews at the time of its initial publication and remains an overwhelming reading experience today. While each of the stories is a freestanding work of art, when read together they carry the force of a novel.

Powerful and poignant, a masterpiece. ''Through the Wheat'' depicts the horrors of World War 1: the first modern war fought in trenches with mustard gas, artillery, and tanks. Thomas Boyd brings home the psychological damage done to men under extreme pressure fighting for their livers thousands of miles from home. Unforgettable!

Powerful and poignant, a masterpiece. 'Through the Wheat' depicts the horrors of World War 1: the first modern war fought in trenches with mustard gas, artillery, and tanks. Thomas Boyd brings home the psychological damage done to men under extreme pressure fighting for their livers thousands of miles from home. Unforgettable!

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.

Powerful and poignant, a masterpiece. ''Through the Wheat'' depicts the horrors of World War 1: the first modern war fought in trenches with mustard gas, artillery, and tanks. Thomas Boyd brings home the psychological damage done to men under extreme pressure fighting for their livers thousands of miles from home. Unforgettable!