Author Thomas Boyd is best known for the novel "Through the Wheat" that has long been considered the greatest American novel of World War I ever written. Boyd was a Marine in WWI, seeing a great deal of fighting action, and was deeply influenced by what he went through on the battlefield. Later, he wrote for newspapers, and while working in a bookstore and writing the literary page of the newspaper in St. Paul, Minnesota, was befriended by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who put him in contact with his own famous editor, Maxwell Perkins. As a result, Boyd published several books with Scribners, all edited by Perkins, including this short story collection, somewhat in place of writing a sequel to his first war novel, in 1925. As he does in other books, Boyd thoroughly rejects the romance of war, creating situations that are sometimes grotesque, sometimes absurd, always human at their core. This collection has been called "haunting" and like its better known predecessor, "Through the Wheat," should be included in the canon of American war stories.
