Talk:Paul Fussell

The Velvel Interview Took Place in 2006
The Velvel interview took place in 2006.Papertrail 18:48, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Class vs. Caste marks
Does anyone know if Caste Marks: Style and Status in the USA is the same book as Class, A Guide Through the American Status System, but in a different edition (i.e., one is US, the other UK)? Or are they completely different books? --little Alex (talk) 18:32, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Tag & Assess 2008
Article reassessed and graded as start class. --dashiellx (talk) 18:22, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Information removed from article
The following information was removed from the article in this edit and this edit by User:Scott MacDonald:

Removed from the lead section:
 * "professor emeritus of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania"
 * "essayist, scholar"
 * "whose experience in World War II shaped his life and career as an author and university professor."

Removed from the main article:
 * "Betty Fussell, author of many books"
 * "Harriette Behringer whom he describes as the love of his life in 1987"
 * "To war's chaos he opposed English pastoral, especially the vision of rational enlightenment that fired such eighteenth-century literary giants as Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift."
 * "his focus on language had a moral mission."
 * The Great War won for Fussell both critical acclaim and a far larger audience, as he launched successive works on the twentieth-century culture of the England he admired and the America he condemned. His firm grasp of the literary genre brought new attention to travel literature in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars . His grasp of the personal essay informed his first book about World War II, The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations(1982).

I'd like to know why this information was removed the article. Green Cardamom (talk) 16:41, 13 May 2011 (UTC)


 * The problem is that most of this article is written from self-published claims. "professor emeritus" is generally an honourable lectureship and doesn't belong in the lead. If it is a significant part of the article (and referenced) - maybe.
 * "scholar" is just general puffery. "Academic" would indicate an objective role and employment - scholar simply asserts "clever and well-read". Puffery.
 * That a the enlightenment fired up Alexander Pope in the eighteen century is an irrelevance. This purple prose simply serves to puff the subject by association with literary greats.
 * Who says "it has a moral mission"? If he claimed that - say "he claimed that". But anyone can claim anything has a "moral mission" - it is meaningless cliché.--Scott Mac 16:53, 13 May 2011 (UTC)


 * (edit conflict) I sort of agree with Green Cardamom. I mean, the article can use some editing for tone and so forth. But the fact is that Fussell is widely regarded as an Important Writer, and it just makes us look silly to slap WP:PEACOCK tags on the article for saying so. I mean, he was a professor at a number of major institutions, and now he's retired - what's wrong with calling him a "professor emeritus"? It's not "honorary" - it's a typical title for someone who's had a distinguished academic career and is now retired. The article could use more third-party sources, but they're not too hard to find. The Great War and Modern Memory is widely understood to be a classic (e.g., ). Wartime was deeply controversial at the time of its publication (e.g. , ). Doing Battle, like most of his books, was reviewed by major outlets including the New York Times. If the concern is that the article is too "positive", then I suppose one could delve into The Kitchen Wars, by Betty Fussell (Paul Fussell's ex-wife), which as one might expect paints a none-too-flattering portrait. In any case, though, the tags don't seem justified, at least to me. MastCell Talk 16:59, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Yeah I'm not sure Scott M has really read anything about Fussell. It just takes 10 minutes to read some articles about him to get a sense of who he is, why he is important, and what he did - and the so-called "puffry" turns into mainstream opinion. We're supposed to report on what the world says and thinks - this article seems to have underplayed or not even discuss his reputation and accomplishments. It could certainly use more sources is really the main problem, the editors who wrote it are not using sources. Green Cardamom (talk) 17:06, 13 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I've no idea whether the article is too positive. I've never heard of the guy, but you can't subjective terms to describe "critical acclaim" and source them to his own writings. It actually makes him look self-serving. If his popularity and critical acclaim are worth recording, find objective ways to do so - prizes won, books sold, famous authors who have credited him as an inspiration. The text of the article didn't comply with NPOV. I don't need to have read anything about him to know we don't write articles like this in wikipedia. We stay detached, factual and objective.--Scott Mac 17:08, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, the critical acclaim is in the article, sort of, in the awards section (Nat Book Award and NBCC award, both of which are among the top-10 prestigious book awards in the US) - the problem really is one of sourcing, the article needs a lot of work, but there are plenty of sources about Fussell, he's very famous and well regarded. Green Cardamom (talk) 17:57, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

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Hi, there. I'm not a wikipedian, but I thought I could give someone who knows how to make changes a hint on how to improve this article. I noticed the following in the article: "He landed in France in 1944 as a 20-year-old second lieutenant with the 103rd Infantry Division[8] (45th Infantry Division, according to Fussell in his article on the atom bomb in The New Republic, 1981) and was wounded while fighting in Alsace, and was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart." This suggests that there is some confusion. In fact, Paul Fussell was a member of the 103d Infantry Division and was wounded, I believe, in mid-February 1945, the day that the 103d began the Spring offensive. After he recuperated, he was sent to the 45th ID, an adjacent unit in the same region. (If you were sent back to the hospital, there was no policy of returning you to the same unit, a much criticized aspect of the American way of fighting WWII.) So, this is the unit he was training with when the bomb was dropped in Japan. This reconciles his two different accounts, both of which are correct. If you want to verify he was in the 103d, he was interviewed in Richard Stannard's book Infantry Battalion, which is all about his unit. Toodle pip! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:80:4580:1270:51B7:9E45:3AF7:BEE2 (talk) 02:10, 29 August 2019 (UTC)