Our Collection

World War One

To accompany our exhibition in the Peluso Family Exhibition Gallery, From the Western Front and Beyond: The Writings of World War One, we offer some WWI-related book recommendations from Library staff. The Library began actively collecting WWI books during the war, and has built a rich collection of titles over the last 100 years. Among the varied recommendations below you will find memoirs written by nurses, Vaudeville stars, and German soldiers, collections of poetry, epic works of fiction, and children’s books recommended by our children’s librarians. To see a long list of recent acquisitions related to World War One, check this blog post. 

Be sure to drop by the Peluso Family Exhibition Gallery and to pick up a copy of the exhibition catalog, which features essays by Caroline Alexander (The War That Killed Achilles), Adam Kirsch (Why Trilling Matters), Head of Exhibitions Harriet Shapiro, and Head Librarian Mark Bartlett, as well as a selected list of books for further reading.

 A Diary Without Dates | Enid Bagnold

The Backwash of War | Ellen La Motte

Some of the most disturbing and powerful literature to emerge from World War One was written by nurses. The English novelist Enid Bagnold was nineteen when she wrote A Diary Without Dates. For her unsparing honesty about the running of the Royal Herbert Hospital in London, Bagnold was dismissed for breach of military discipline. The Backwash of War by the American nurse Ellen La Motte also provoked swift official pushback.  La Motte was one of the first American nurses to go to France to work in a mobile surgical unit near Ypres.  She writes with a scalpel dipped in ink as she describes the follies and horrors of military medicine along the Western Front.  First published in 1916, The Backwash of War was suppressed by the U.S. government and not republished until 1934.  Bagnold and La Motte’s narratives deserve our close attention. — Harriet Shapiro, Head of Exhibitions

The Winter of the World: Poems of the First World War | Dominic Hibberd, ed.

Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry | Vivien Oakes, ed.

Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War | Catherine W. Reilly, ed.

It is difficult to choose only one anthology of Great War poetry to recommend, so I have selected three. One I’ve particularly enjoyed since seeing it in a bookstore this summer is The Winter of the World: Poems of the First World War, edited by Dominic Hibberd and John Onions. The editors have approached this anthology with a fresh concept: a year by year selection of poetry through the war. Another book skillfully researched and annotated is Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry, a rich collection of light and serious verse from newspapers, periodicals, private scrapbooks, trench and hospital magazines, autograph albums, postcards, and more. A third collection, Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War, features work by Vera Brittain, Rose Macaulay, Edith Nesbit, Edith Sitwell and many other poets worthy of your reading attention. — Mark Bartlett, Head Librarian 

Storm of Steel | Ernst Jünger

To readers familiar with the well-known British WWI memoirists and poets, and their many heirs from subsequent wars, the effect of Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger can be jarring. First published in 1920, this is a memoir that emphasizes action—brutal, vivid, and terrifying—over sensitive reflection, politics, or military strategy. Jünger is no pacifist, and battle scenes are rendered with a palpable rush that is in stark contrast with Graves and company. In his excellent essay on the British war poets in From the Western Front and Beyond, Adam Kirsch writes that “the 2,500 year old tradition of military glory died between 1914 and 1918, and the poems of these young men are its obituary and autopsy report.” Ernst Jünger, it seems, would have disagreed. Jünger went on to write many more books in various genres during his long life (1895-1998), and was the subject of much controversy in Germany, but it is for Storm of Steel that he will be most remembered. The Library owns both the 2004 Penguin Classics translation by Michael Hofmann and the 1929 translation by Basil Creighton. — Steven McGuirl, Head of Acquisitions

The Big Show: My Six Months with the American Expeditionary Forces | Elsie Janis

The Big Show is the memoir of vaudeville star Elsie Janis, who performed for soldiers in camps and hospitals across France in 1918. Though a number of baffled military officials attempt to keep the star and her mother from travelling by car through such dangerous territory, Ms. Janis will not be stopped. Her descriptions of the soldiers, some of whom have not seen a woman in civilian clothes for months, are priceless. She dances the foxtrot with eighteen partners, one after the other, at an artillery camp, speeds from Nancy to Toul during an air raid in a Cadillac, and welcomes a ship full of soldiers to France from her balcony in a pink kimono.  An odd duck among a number of war stories published just after the armistice, Janis’s story reads like the diary of a travelling entertainer on a romp through a terribly exciting adventure. Katie Fricas, Events Assistant/Circulation Assistant

Parade’s End | Ford Maddox Ford 

Ford (1873-1939) wrote four novels whose action takes place shortly before, during, and after WWI: Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928).  Known collectively as Parade’s End, they were not published as a single entity until 1950, though Ford himself felt this was how they should be read. Ford’s combat experiences inspired him to create a work whose purpose was “the obviating of all future wars.”

Parade’s End tells the story of Christopher Tietjens, an upright younger son of a British ruling-class family.  His rigorous code of personal morality dominates his life, and leaves him open to the jealousy and misunderstanding of his fellow army officers and the loathing of his wife.  Sylvia Tietjens is Iago-like in the monomaniacal nature of her hatred for her husband, whose primary sin is overlooking her adultery for the sake of his child and family honor.  She is surely one of the most exquisitely drawn and horrifying villainesses in English literature. 

Parade’s End is as much about the conflict raging in a man’s mind as it is about the physical war in which he serves. It is a fairly demanding read: the style is impressionistic, the time-frame is not always linear, and it can be almost Jamesian in the opacity of its characters’ motivations.  The reader’s patience is rewarded by a three-dimensional portrayal of a unique character, struggling to reconstruct a principled life when everything that he believed in and fought for lies in ruins around him. — Diane Srebnick, Development Assistant

The Regeneration Trilogy | Pat Barker

Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road

In 1917, after fighting valiantly, Siegfried Sassoon declined to return to service, furious in his belief that the war was being deliberately prolonged at the expense of the soldiers. His statement, "Finished with the War: a Soldier's Declaration," was read in the House of Commons and published in the London Times. Authorities declared him unfit for trial and sent him to Craiglockhart Hospital to be treated for shell shock by Dr. W.H.R. Rivers. These real-life events open Regeneration by Pat Barker, the first of a trilogy of novels about the horrors of WWI. It takes place almost exclusively at Craiglockhart, where soldiers are being treated for shell shock, so that they might be sent back to fight.  With so much at stake, it’s no surprise that this book is electrifying. Barker’s achievement shines brightest in the subsequent two novels when the fictional characters, introduced in the first, take to the fore.  Though death haunts these novels, the characters are vital and ultimately unforgettable.  — Patrick Rayner, Acquisitions Assistant/Circulation Assistant

Children’s Books

The Doll Shop Downstairs | Yona Zeldis McDonough 

Travel back to 1914 New York and see it through the eyes of 9-year-old Anna who loves to play with her sisters and the dolls in their family’s bustling doll repair shop on the Lower East Side. In The Doll Shop Downstairs, a sweet old fashioned tale that was inspired by the true story of the creators of the Madame Alexander dolls and brings to mind Sidney Taylor’s All-of-a-kind Family, author Yona Zeldis McDonough ably brings the reader along with Anna uptown to FAO Schwartz, around her close-knit neighborhood, and into the girls’ elaborate and imaginative games with the dolls they wish belonged to them. Tension builds when World War I begins and Anna’s family worries about relatives back in Russia. When a war-time embargo—on the German parts needed to fix the dolls—threatens the family’s livelihood, Anna comes up with an ingenious plan to help save the business. If you like this short novel you can read more about Anna and her family in The Cats in the Doll Shop, another realistic tale set during World War I. Save the date to join us for our upcoming event with author Yona Zeldis McDonough on April 4.  Randi Levy, Children’s Librarian

Rilla of Ingleside | L.M. Montgomery

Rilla of Ingleside is the eighth novel in L.M. Montgomery’s series beginning with Anne of Green Gables. At nearly 15, Rilla Blythe, Anne Shirley's youngest daughter, has led a carefree idyllic life on Prince Edward Island eagerly anticipating dances and parties, but that is all changed when war is declared. Local young men, including her three brothers and a potential sweetheart, enlist and depart for Europe. Rilla is roused to help with the Junior Red Cross and before she realizes it, swept away into raising a "war baby". The fate of the local soldiers does not play out as sweetly as Rilla hopes and by the war and the novel's end, at age 19, she emerges a more mature young lady, though still with romantic notions.

Montgomery accurately captures the response of a teenaged girl removed from, yet impacted by, the Great War. Of special note is the unique Canadian perspective of the American president's response to the war. Fans of the Anne series will enjoy this penultimate novel in which the once spunky redhead, now called "Mrs. Dr.", has the lives of her children taking center stage. — Susan Vincent Molinaro, Children's and Interlibrary Loan Librarian