"For his generation, the poetry and career of Siegfried Sassoon were emblematic of the ways in which the secure truths of Western civilization were destroyed in the hopeless foxholes of the First World War. It is difficult to imagine the works of Virginia Woolf or Hemingway or Faulkner existing without him. . . ." --"Graham Christian, The Boston Phoenix"

Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 and educated at Clare College, Cambridge. He served in the trenches during the First World War, where he began to write the poems for which he is remembered. Dispatched as 'shell-shocked' to hospital, he organised public protest against the war. His poetry initially met with little response, but his reputation grew steadily in the following decades. Apart from the War Poems of 1919, he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime. But it as a novelist and autobiographer that he is perhaps better-known. Sassoon's semi-autobiographical trilogy - Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936) - was outstandingly successful. He published several more volumes of autobiography, including Siegfried's Journey (1945), before his death in 1967.