Paul Fussell (born 1924, Pasadena, California) is a cultural historian, professor emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, and author of books on eighteenth-century English literature, World War II, and social class.

Fussell was called up in 1943, and is a combat infantry veteran of the European campaign: he was wounded while fighting in France as a second lieutenant.

An early influence was H. L. Mencken, but he shed Mencken as a mentor when faced with the wartime experience. He has cultivated an unapologetically difficult personal and writing style.

Works

• The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations (1959)
• Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965)
• The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (1965)
• Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (1966)
• Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1969) editor with Geoffrey Tillotson and Marshall Waingrow
• Samuel Johnson: The Life of Writing (1971)
• English Augustan Poetry (1972)
• The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
• The Ordeal of Alfred M. Hale: The Memoirs of a Soldier Servant (1975) editor
• Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980)
• Sassoon's Long Journey (1983) editor, from The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston
• Class, A Guide Through the American Status System (1983)
• Caste Marks: Style and Status in the USA (1984)
• The Norton Book of Travel (1987) editor
• Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (1988)
• Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989)
• BAD: or, The Dumbing of America (1991)
• The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War (1991)
• The Norton Book of Modern War (1991) editor
• The Anti-Egotist. Kingsley Amis: Man of Letters (1994)
• Doing Battle - The Making of a Skeptic (1996) autobiography
• Uniforms : Why We Are What We Wear (2002)
• The Boys’ Crusade : The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 (2004)

External links

• Brief biography
• Guardian profile