How soon we forget

Imagine how many forgotten gems of literature there are. I'm not talking about topical popular literature, books which are almost written to be forgotten, but serious books taken seriously by a generation that get forgotten by the next. Who reads Dos Passos' "USA trilogy" today? Yet I consider it "the Great American Novel." For that matter, who even reads an incredible gem like Evan Connell's "Mrs. Bridge"? Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road"? In the 60s, in grad school, I and others considered these master works of American fiction. Well, I still do.

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Two Famous, Forgotten WWI Novels On this day of Remembrance, we remember two forgotten war books, both once highly-regarded, the second for raising a topic many would rather forget. Frederic Manning's fictionalized memoir, titled The Middle Parts of Fortune in its unexpurgated editions, Her Privates We in expurgated form, was published in 1929, as were a handful of war classics -- A Farewell to Arms, Goodbye to All That, All Quiet on the Western Front. One passage in Manning's book says that, from his fellow soldiers, a deserter would get only one judgment: "Shoot the bugger!" This was done 266 times in WWI by British military authorities, dozens of times more in the Commonwealth countries. The first novel to broach the subject, and suggest that the issue was more complex than most thought, was A. P. Herbert's The Secret Battle, written in 1919. Churchill wrote an introduction for it in later editions, describing it as "a soldier's tale cut in stone to melt all hearts."