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Paul Fussell (born March 22, 1924, Pasadena, California, USA) is a cultural and literary historian, and professor emeritus of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of books on eighteenth-century English literature, the world wars, and social class, among others. Fussell was drafted into the Army in 1943, at age 19. In October 1944 he landed in France, as part of the 103rd Infantry Division. On November 11th, he experienced his first night on the front lines. He was wounded while fighting in France as a second lieutenant. Fussell suffered from depression and rage for years following his military service. In his 1996 autobiography he associated this condition with the dehumanization of his military service and his anger at the way the United States government and popular culture romanticized warfare. Since the 1980s Fussell has been an outspoken critic of the glorification of military service and warfare. An early influence was H. L. Mencken, but he shed Mencken as a mentor, calling him "deficient in the tragic sense", after his wartime experience. He spent his undergraduate years at Pomona College, and earned a Ph. D. at Harvard University. He has taught at Connecticut College, Rutgers University, the University of Heidelberg, King's College London, and the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from teaching in the mid-1990s. Fussell's 1975 literary study The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) won the National Book Award for Arts and Letters, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa. Military historian John Keegan calls it a "simply superb book". Fussell was one of several veterans interviewed in the Ken Burns documentary "The War" in 2007.
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