Second, Sassoon spent much of the last forty years of his life twice reliving and rewriting the first thirty-five by producing three autobiographical novels--Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and Sherston's Progress (1936)--and then returning to the same memories in three autobiographies: The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942), and Siegfried's Journey, 1916-1920 (1945). In doing so he not only established himself as a master crafter of prose and a prizewinning novelist but also created an evocation of a long-past bucolic Victorian and Edwardian England: a place of country houses and large agricultural estates, a time of slowly passing seasons filled with hunts and harvests, cricket and croquet, and comity between the social classes. A monstrous war destroyed that world and left in its ruins a modern industrial society in which Sassoon and many others could never be comfortable.
Third, with the anonymous publication of the award-winning Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man Sassoon started the flood of World War I remembrance literature that included Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War (1928), R.
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