The Sherston trilogy is a series of books by the
English poet and
novelist,
Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English war poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both describ ...
, consisting of ''
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man'', ''
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer'', and ''
Sherston's Progress
''Sherston's Progress'' is the final book of Siegfried Sassoon's semi-autobiographical trilogy. It is preceded by '' Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man'' and ''Memoirs of an Infantry Officer''.
Synopsis
The book starts with his arrival at 'Slateford ...
''. They are named after the protagonist, George Sherston - a young Englishman of the upper middle-class, living immediately before and during the
First World War.
The books are, in fact, '
fictionalised autobiography
An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written account of one's own life.
It is a form of biography.
Definition
The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English peri ...
', wherein the only truly fictional things are the names of the characters. Sassoon himself is represented by Sherston. A comparison of the Sherston memoirs to Sassoon's later, undiluted autobiographical trilogy (''The Old Century'', ''The Weald of Youth'', and ''Siegfried's Journey'') shows their strict similarity, and it is generally accepted that all six books constitute a composite portrait of the author, and of his life as a young man. (Sassoon remarked, however, that his alter-ego personified only one-fifth of his actual personality. Unlike his author, Sherston has no poetic inclinations; nor does he deal with
homosexuality, which was illegal at the time Sassoon was writing.)
The Sherston trilogy won high acclaim, and ''
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man'' took the
Hawthornden Prize for Literature for 1928. The three books were printed together in one volume, ''The Memoirs of George Sherston'', in 1937.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sherston Trilogy
Literary trilogies