Wartime

Paul Fussell sets aside the glamorized combat of popular films and turns instead to the people who lived through the Second World War. His focus is on how ordinary soldiers and civilians thought, felt and acted under the strain of the conflict. The book looks at the daily routines of Britons and Americans, both at home and at the front, and asks what those routines reveal about the war's effect on individuals.

Fussell brings a literary critic's eye to this social history. Drawing on the testimony and cultural record of the period, he explores how wartime experience was shaped by attitudes, expectations and the gap between the myths of war and its reality. The book is written for general readers of history and anyone interested in how the war was lived rather than only how it was fought.

Fussell was a scholar of English literature who served as an infantry officer in Europe during the war, a background that informs his close attention to language and personal experience. He is also known for his earlier study of the First World War, The Great War and Modern Memory.