20 Facts About Paul Fussell

Paul Fussell's writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America's class system.

Paul Fussell is best known for his writings about World War I and II, which explore what he felt was the gap between the romantic myth and reality of war; he made a "career out of refusing to disguise it or elevate it".

Paul Fussell's brother, Edwin Sill Fussell, was an author, poet, and professor of American Studies at the University of California, San Diego; his sister Florence Fussell Lind lives in Berkeley, California.

Paul Fussell's daughter, Rosalind, is an artist-teacher in Arizona and the author of a graphic novel, Mammoir: A Pictorial Odyssey of the Adventures of a Fourth Grade Teacher with Breast Cancer.

Paul Fussell attended Pomona College from 1941 until he was commissioned as an officer in the United States Army in 1943.

Paul Fussell landed in France in 1944 as a 20-year-old second lieutenant with the 103rd Infantry Division, was wounded while fighting in Alsace, and was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

Paul Fussell began his teaching career at Connecticut College before moving to Rutgers University in 1955 and finally the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.

Paul Fussell taught at the University of Heidelberg and King's College London.

Betty Paul Fussell has described their marriage and its breakup in 1981 in her memoir, My Kitchen Wars.

Paul Fussell retired from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and lived with his wife in Oregon.

When he first entered college, Paul Fussell intended a career in journalism.

Paul Fussell's plans changed when his sergeant was killed beside him in combat, about which he wrote in his memoir Doing Battle.

Paul Fussell pointed to what he saw as the hypocrisy of governmental speech and the corruption of popular culture.

Paul Fussell's published thesis, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England, was developed into Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, a popular textbook for understanding poetry.

Paul Fussell stated that he relished the inevitable controversy of Class: A Guide Through the American Status System and indulged his increasing public status as a loved or hated "curmudgeon" in the rant called BAD: or, The Dumbing of America.

Paul Fussell was elected in 1977 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Paul Fussell won the 2005 Hessell-Tiltman Prize for The Boys' Crusade.

Paul Fussell was one of several veterans interviewed in the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The War in 2007, and in the 1999 ABC-produced documentary The Century: America's Time.

Paul Fussell died of natural causes on 23 May 2012 at a long-term care facility in Medford, Oregon.

Paul Fussell had previously lived in Portland, Oregon for two years.