Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780393089073)

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of the war poets. This haunting account of his final five years follows him from his beloved English countryside to the battlefield in France where he lost his life.

When he met the American poet Robert Frost in 1913, Thomas was tormented by feelings of failure in his work and in his marriage. With Frost's encouragement he began writing poem after poem as he finally found the expression for which he had spent his life searching. But the First World War put an ocean between them: Frost returned to New England while Thomas enlisted and went to fight in France. It is these roads taken--and not taken--that are at the heart of this unforgettable book, which culminates in Thomas's tragic death on Easter Monday, 1917.

Now All Roads Lead to France encompasses an astonishingly creative moment in English literature, when London was a battleground for new, ambitious writing. A generation that included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Rupert Brooke was "making it new"--vehemently and pugnaciously--and this dazzling biography places Thomas firmly in their midst.

Author: Matthew Hollis
ISBN-10: 039308907X
ISBN-13: 9780393089073
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English
Published: 10/22/2012
Pages: 416
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 9.50h x 6.50w x 1.50d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2012
Booklist 09/15/2012 pg. 13
Shelf Awareness 11/02/2012
New Yorker (The) 01/28/2013 pg. 77
New York Review of Books 03/07/2013 pg. 30
Books & Culture 07/01/2013 pg. 24