Fussell brought an erudition, a gift for readable prose, a willingness to offend and, as many critics noted, a whiff of snobbery to subjects like class, clothing, the dumbing down of American culture and the literature of travel.

Fussell into a public intellectual, or perhaps more accurately a public curmudgeon he crabbed, for instance, about Graham Greene’s “inability to master English syntax.” Mr. The lavish praise and commercial success of “The Great War” transformed Mr. Yet, whether in spite of or because of the enormity of his assertions, Fussell has set the agenda for most of the criticism that has followed him.” His claims for the meaning of the war are profound and far-reaching indeed, some have found them hyperbolic. Sherry wrote in “The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War.” “The book’s ambition and popularity move interpretation of the war from a relatively minor literary and historical specialization to a much more widespread cultural concern. Fussell’s own bloody experience as an infantryman during World War II, won both the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the National Book Award for Arts and Letters.įussell’s influence was huge, Vincent B.

But his career changed in 1975, when he published “The Great War and Modern Memory,” a monumental study of World War I and how its horrors fostered a disillusioned modernist sensibility.

Fussell followed a conventional academic path, teaching and writing on literary topics, specializing in 18th-century British poetry and prose. His stepson Cole Behringer said he died of natural causes in the long-term care facility where he had spent the last two years.įrom the 1950s into 1970s, Mr. Paul Fussell, the wide-ranging, stingingly opinionated literary scholar and cultural critic whose admiration for Samuel Johnson, Kingsley Amis and the Boy Scout Handbook and his withering scorn for the romanticization of war, the predominance of television and much of American society were dispensed in more than 20 books, died on Wednesday in Medford, Ore.

Fussell on class