The authorized biography of a literary legend, written with unique access to all of Sassoon's previously unseen papers. The life of Siegfried Sassoon has been recorded and interpreted in literature and film for over half a century. He is one of the great figures of the First World War, and Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer are still widely read, as are his poems, which did much to shape our present ideas about the Great War. Sassoon was a genuine hero, a brave young officer who also became the war's most famous opponent, risking imprisonment and even a death sentence by throwing his Military Cross into the Mersey. He was friend to Robert Graves, mentor to Wilfred Owen and much admired by Churchill. But Sassoon was more than the embodiment of a romantic ideal; he was in many senses the perfect product of a vanished age. And many questions about his character, unique experience and motivations have remained unanswered until now. With unprecedented access to Sassoon's complete papers and the support of the family, and after insightful conversations with Sassoon's lover Stephen Tennant, Max Egremont has produced a wonderfully insightful and engaging book that is as much a vivid portrait of an era as it is an elegant and fascinating biography of a complicated and enigmatic man.

Author Biography

Max Egremont was born in 1948 and studied Modern History at Oxford University. As well as four novels, he is the author of The Cousins and Balfour: A Life of Arthur James Balfour. His acclaimed biography of Siegfried Sassoon was published in 2005 and his most recent work is Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia.