Sassoon, Siegfried ___ 1886-1967 ___ British ___ poet

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Sassoon was born at Weirleigh, Kent, and educated at Marlborough College, and Clare College, Cambridge. After leaving Cambridge without a degree, he spent nearly a decade doing very little, other than hunting, socialising and writing some occasional verse. With the onset of war, he enlisted as a cavalry trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, and then, in 1915, because of a riding accident, he switched to become an officer in the Royal Fusiliers, and was posted to the Western Front. He was considered a reckless soldier, but was awarded the Military Cross for rescuing a wounded man under heavy fire. Significantly, while in France, he met Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen. In 1917, he was wounded and returned to England, but, by then, had grown hostile to the war and the British Army. With the war still raging, he published several controversial poems such as 'The Old Huntsman' and 'Counter-Attack'. Nevertheless, once recovered, he served further in Palestine and France. After the war, Sassoon became a literary celebrity, but then settled down and spent the best part of two decades writing six autobiographical or semi-autobiographical books, such as 'Memoirs of an Infantry Officer' and 'Siegfried's Journey'. He married Hester Gatty in 1933, and they had one son, before the marriage was dissolved in the 1940s.
A biography link
Wikipedia bio

DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1915-1925 ___ literary military self nature music people horses

WEB TEXT LINKS
two short extracts
one longish extract
a bit about and citations

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
 

SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
Diaries 1915-1918
Diaries 1920-1922
Diaries 1923-1925 
 

May 2005, August 2008
Please email if you have any corrections, additions or comments, or if you've found the site useful. Thank you.

IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS: 1) The first line of basic information may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown, or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British' a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies. 4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges, and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising. I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries.