In the course of his varied careers in Canada and the United States as a journalist, theater manager, real-estate salesman, public-relations consultant, radio commentator, and housing expert, Charles Yale Harrison wrote fiction, biography, autobiography, and several pamphlets on public housing-the first of their kind. But it was his shattering experience as a soldier in a Canadian regiment in World War I that inspired his major achievement, the novel Generals Die in Bed (1930). Compared in the 1930s with fictional and autobiographical classics of World War I literature such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That (1929), and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), Generals Die in Bed can be read as a forerunner of the most celebrated contemporary Canadian novel to deal with World War I, Timothy Findley's The Wars (1977).

Harrison was born in...