The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston

Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (1928)
George Sherston develops from a shy and awkward child, through shiftless adolescence, to an officer just beginning to understand the horrors of trench warfare. The world he grows up in, of village cricket and loyal grooms, had vanished forever by the time Sassoon wrote this book, but he captures it with a lyricism and gentleness that defy nostalgia.

A bestseller on publication in 1928, this superb evocation of the Edwardian age has remained in print ever since. It was the first volume of a classic trilogy, completed by Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress, that charted both the destruction of the world for which Sassoon fought, and his own emergence as one of Britain's finest war poets.

Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930)
'It is my own story I am trying to tell, and as such it must be received; those who expect a universalization of the Great War must look for it elsewhere.'

Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, first published in 1930, is Siegfried Sassoon's fictionalized autobiography of the period between the early spring of 1916 and the summer of 1917. The narrative moves from the trenches to the Fourth Army School, to Morlancourt and a raid, then to and through the Somme. The mind of the narrator turns from unquestioning acceptance of the war and of the standards which it set up, to doubting the necessity of the seemingly endless slaughter.

and Sherston's Progress (1936)

Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 and educated at Clare College, Cambridge. He served in the trenches during the First World War, where he began to write the poems for which he is remembered. Dispatched as 'shell-shocked' to hospital, he organised public protest against the war. His poetry initially met with little response, but his reputation grew steadily in the following decades. Apart from the War Poems of 1919, he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime.

But it as a novelist and autobiographer that he is perhaps better-known. Sassoon's semi-autobiographical trilogy, published under the title The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston - Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936) - was outstandingly successful. He published several more volumes of autobiography, including Siegfried's Journey (1945), before his death in 1967.