Sassoon, Siegfried

Related Category: English Literature, 20th cent. to the Present: Biographies

1886–1967, English poet and novelist. A heroic and decorated officer in World War I, he nonetheless expressed his conviction of the brutality and waste of war in grim, forceful, realistic verse—The Old Huntsman (1917), Counter-Attack (1918), Satirical Poems (1926), Vigils (1935), Sequences (1957), and others. His fictional, semiautobiographical trilogy—Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), Sherston's Progress (1936)—was collected as The Memoirs of George Sherston (1937). Sassoon also wrote several autobiographical works—The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942), and Siegfried's Journey (1945)—and a biography of George Meredith (1948).

See his Collected Poems, 1908–1956 (1961); biographies by J. M. Wilson (2 vol., 1998–2003), J. S. Roberts (1999), and M. Egremont (2005).