THROUGH THE WHEAT
Thomas Boyd
VG/VG. Original "$8.95" price still intact on dust jacket.
(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1978). One of the Lost American Fiction series edited
by Matthew J. Bruccolli. Reprinted from the original Scribners 1923 edition.
Unique to this edition: an Afterward by James Dickey. 278 pages.
Through the Wheat was recommended to Scribners by F. Scott
Fitzgerald and received highly favorable notice on its appearance from
Edmund Wilson, among others. Boyd served with B Company, 1st Battalion,
6th Marines at Belleau Wood, Soissons, St Mihiel and Blanc Mont, where
he was seriously gassed. After the war he worked as a journalist and writer,
publishing nine books of fiction and history. He died at 37 of a cerebral
hemorrhage.
EXCERPT: "For a distance of two miles, from the ravine
to the village where the supply wagons were stationed, men lay dead and
dying. In the woods and particularly in the gulley that ran through the
woods to the village, the thick yellow gas clung to the ground. Wherever
the gas had touched the skin of the men, dark flaming blisters appeared.
Like acid, the yellow gas ate into the flesh and blinded the eyes. The
ground was a dump-heap of bodies, limbs of trees, legs and arms independent
of bodies, and pieces of equipment. Here was a combat pack forlorn, its
bulge indicating such articles as a razor, an extra shirt, the last letter
from home, a box of hard bread. Another place a heavy shoe, with a wad
of spiral puttee near by. Where yesterday's crosses had been erected, a
shell had churned a body out of its shallow grave, separating from the
torso the limbs. The crosses themselves had been blown flat, as if by a
terrific wind."
"There is no battle scene in Tolstoy's War
and Peace, no conflict in Stendhal's account of Waterloo, to equal the drama and terror of Boyd's account of
Private Hicks' advance through the wheat." ~~ James Dickey.
This hardcover edition published in 1978 at $8.95, now OUT OF PRINT.
$35.00
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