Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet. A Biography 1886 - 1918

The first of two volumes, this biography of Siegfried Sassoon covers his life up to the end of World War I. A descendant from a dynasty of merchant princes and a line of famous artists, he was a Jew turned Catholic, a husband and father who enjoyed close relationships with members of his own sex (Stephen Tennant among others). Celebrated as the author of some of the most moving war poems and of the "Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man", Sassoon's inner feelings have nonetheless remained imprisoned in his diaries, only a proportion of which it has been deemed appropriate to publish thus far. With Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, Sassoon struggled with his sexuality, a story he wanted to capture himself to bridge "the raging (or lethargic) river of intolerance which divides creatures of my temperament from a free and unsecretive existence among their fellow men". Prevented from doing so by the law, however, he died in 1967, the year in which homosexuality was legalised. This biography is the result of seven years of research. In this first volume the author traces Sassoon's life as one of the Gilded Youth of the Great War generation and the first modern figure of the 20th century. A friend to everyone worth knowing, ranging from the Sitwells to Sir Winston Churchill, Sassoon was forced to come to terms with the banality of a war, at the same time as dealing with changes in his own identity.