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Summary:
Fresh out of a Defiance, Ohio, high school, Thomas Boyd (1898–1935) joined the Marines to serve his country in the patriotic heat of the spring of 1917. In 1919 he came home from the war with a Croix de Guerre and a desire to write. He joined the St. Paul News as a journalist and opened a bookstore, whose patrons included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. Through the Wheat appeared to immediate acclaim, with F. Scott Fitzgerald calling it "a work of art" and "arresting." Boyd wrote five other works before he died in Vermont of a cerebral hemorrhage at age thirty-seven.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Realistic Picture of WWI
Customer Rating:
Started out slow, Boyd seemed caught up in using as many adjectives as a sentence could hold. Once I got past that and was able to focus on his story it flowed easily. His accurate depiction of what it was like for the average Marine was outstanding. A very good read of USMC WWI history.
Realistic war picture
Customer Rating:
This is a novel about what it was lke fighting in the trenches of WW I. Edmund Wilson among others thought it one of the best war novels in our literature. Boyd is a fierce realist (he was a soldier in the war, too) and pulls no punches. Death and misery are everywhere, and no one really knows what they're doing there. But Boyd is only a mediocre writer, and the realism, though praiseworthy, is not enough. The writing is flat.
Easy read
Customer Rating:
Thomas Boyd's "Through the Wheat" was written by a former newpaperman and the book is fairly easy to read. The writing style was such that you though that it was a true story being told to a friend. He was better known when he was alive for his historical novels. But I think this novel was his best.
Thomas Boyd was an interesting man who died from a brain tumor thought to have been caused by his being gassed during the WWI. He came back the war disillusioned and ran for public office in New Hampshire or Vermont as a communist. Mr. Boyd died suddenly in his early thirties and left behind a wife and a daughter. One of his collections of short stories Points of Honor(light) was made in a successful silent movie.
America's Best World War I Novel
Customer Rating:
If asked to name a World War I novel most Americans would almost certainly say "All Quiet on the Western Front". Thanks to our rather uniform public education system, Remarque's novel has earned a place in American culture as the quintessential novel of The Great War. It deserves its reputation as a landmark of 20th century literature, but unfortunately its success contributed to the disapearance from memory of Thomas Boyd's "Through the Wheat". Without moralizing about the cost of war, Boyd brilliantly depicts its horrors and their effects on the psyche of a young American Marine. If you want to understand the Combat experience -- the noise, dirt, distraction, sweat, blood, stench of war -- this is a novel you must read. It is a tragedy that it is no longer in print.
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