"Memorial Fictions" offers a major reassessment of Willa Cather's career and artistic achievements, provides a plethora of information on popular culture during and immediately after the Great War, and demonstrates the importance of literature as a cultural forum for addressing issues and ideas fundamental to American culture. Based on extensive archival research and a variety of scholarly sources drawn from several disciplines, Steven Trout shows how Cather's analysis of the First World War in "One of Ours" and "The Professor's House" represents a considerable accomplishment, one worthy of standing next to her groundbreaking treatment of Nebraska settlers in "O Pioneers!" and "My Antonia" and her virtual reinvention of the historical novel in "Death Comes for the Archbishop" and "Shadows on the Rock," Furthermore, he argues that Cather's First World War-related fiction deserves consideration alongside such established classics as Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms," Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front," and Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth," Though awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, One of Ours was a frequently maligned and misunderstood book. Contemporary male reviewers reviled the work, and it has been Cather's most neglected novel among later generations of readers and scholars. Trout not only reevaluates the impact of the First World War on Cather's fiction but also demonstrates that "One of Ours," far from representing a dubious achievement within the Cather canon, renders the American experience of the war with prophetic insight and considerable imaginative vigor. He also offers a detailed reappraisal of "The Professor's House," showing it to be anovel haunted by the phantomlike presence of the Great War.

Cather Studies 6 is part of a growing body of scholarship that seeks to undo Willa Cather's longstanding reputation as a writer who remained aloof from the cultural issues of her day. This chronologically arranged collection demonstrates that Cather found the subject of war both unavoidable, because of her position in history, and artistically irresistible. The volume begins with an essay addressing the American Civil War as part of Cather's southern cultural inheritance and concludes with an account of the aging writer's participation in the Armed Services Editions Program of World War II. Military matters surface not only in "One of Ours" and "The Professor's House," Cather's two major contributions to the literature of World War I, but in most of her other works as well, including "My Antonia," in which the Plains Indian Wars and the Spanish-American conflict of 1898 are subtly but significantly evoked, and "Sapphira and the Slave Girl," Cather's largely ironic contribution to the genre of southern "Lost Cause" fiction. Containing essays by leading Cather scholars, such as Ann Romines and Janis Stout, and work by specialists in war literature, whose inclusion expands the number and range of critical perspectives, this volume breaks new ground.

Considered by many to be the finest American combat memoir of the First World War, Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame vividly chronicles the experiences of the Twenty-eighth Division in the summer of 1918. Made up primarily of Pennsylvania National Guardsmen, the Twenty-eighth Division saw extensive action on the Western Front. The story begins with Lieutenant Allen and his men marching inland from the French coast and ends with their participation in the disastrous battle for the village of Fismette. Allen was a talented observer, and the men with whom he served emerge as well-rounded characters against the horrific backdrop of the war. As a historical document, Toward the Flame is significant for its highly detailed account of the controversial military action at Fismette. At the same time, it easily stands as a work of literature. Clear-eyed and unsentimental, Allen employs the novelist’s powers of description to create a harrowing portrait of coalition war at its worst.