SOURCE: Shrapnel and Solecisms, in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3977, June 23, 1978, p. 694.

In the following review, Fussell asserts that Through the Wheat has been overvalued as both literature and as a document of war-time experience.

Thomas Boyd's novel of 1923 about his experiences with the United States Marines in France during the First World War was said by Boyd's friend F. Scott Fitzgerald to be “not only the best combatant story of the great war, but also the best war book since The Red Badge of Courage.” It is neither, nor does it provide, as James Dickey asserts in an afterword, “a vision of war that is as profound as any vision of any war has ever been.” But it is a serious, if awkward, autobiographical first novel in the American 1920s tradition of that genre and worth revival for historical if not for artistic reasons.

Like Fitzgerald and Hemingway...