THIS IN-PERSON EVENT IS FULLY REGISTERED. To get a notification if additional space becomes available, contact the Events Office. Or you're welcome to register for the livestream instead.

The First World War comes to harrowing life through the intertwined lives of the soldier-poets in Michael Korda’s epic Muse of Fire. In this unique event, Mr. Korda discusses the book with An Odyssey author Daniel Mendelsohn.

With Muse of Fire, Michael Korda, the best-selling author of Alone and Hero, takes a novel approach to World War I by telling its history through the lives of the soldier-poets whose verses memorialize the war’s unimaginable horrors. He begins with Rupert Brooke and the halcyon days before violence engulfed his generation—destroying the self-contented world of Edwardian England—and ends with the tragic death of Wilfred Owen, killed only days before the armistice brought an end to a war that took over 25,000,000 lives. In a sweeping narrative that echoes The Guns of August, Korda recounts these four years of a civilization destroying itself and portrays the lives and anguished deaths of the young men who unforgettably illuminated it. As the success of Pat Barker’s Regeneration, the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, and the images of brutal trench warfare in today’s Ukraine demonstrate, contemporary interest in “the war to end war” remains high.

Michael Korda is the bestselling author of major biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Robert E. Lee, and T.E. Lawrence, as well as the memoir Charmed Lives. He is Editor in Chief of Simon & Schuster, Emeritus. Educated at Le Rosey, in Switzerland, and Magdalen College, Oxford, he served in the Royal Air Force and participated in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Author photo by Dave Krugman

Daniel Mendelsohn is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator whose honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Prize for Prose Style and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently Editor-at-Large of the New York Review of Books, his many books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France, and Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate.