保罗·福塞尔

保罗·福塞尔（英语：Paul Fussell，1924年3月22日—2012年5月23日），美国作家和历史学家，出生于帕萨迪纳，毕业于波莫纳学院、哈佛大学。皇家文学学会会员。

保罗·福塞尔以独特的视角及幽默的文笔，将美国的社会等级现象描绘细致，同时将美国社会对照到中国的社会百态。

著作

《格调：社会等级与生活品味》 中国计量出版社 2017年 ISBN 9787550292918

2009年入选中国图书商报社和中国出版科学研究所联合主办评选的“新中国60年中国最具影响力的600本书”，列在生活文教类（共28种）。

《恶俗：或现代文明的种种愚蠢》 中国计量出版社 2017年 ISBN 9787550292901

Paul Fussell Jr. (22 March 1924 – 23 May 2012) was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America's class system.

Fussell served in the 103rd Infantry Division during World War II and was wounded in fighting in France. Returning to the US, Fussell wrote extensively and held several faculty positions, most prominently at Rutgers University (1955–1983) and at the University of Pennsylvania (1983–1994). He 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 the reality of war; he made a "career out of refusing to disguise it or elevate it".

Biography

Born and raised in Pasadena, California, Fussell was the sixth of seven children. His father, Paul Fussell (1895–1973), son of a widowed schoolteacher, became a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles with the firm of O'Melveny & Myers, and served as President of the Los Angeles County Bar Association in 1947. His mother, Wilhma Wilson Sill (1893–1971), was the daughter of a carriage trimmer in Illinois. His 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 lived in Berkeley, California.

Starting in 1941, Fussell attended Pomona College until he enlisted in the United States Army in September 1942 and was commissioned as an officer the next year. He landed in France in fall 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. Following the end of the war in Europe, Fussell returned to the United States where he was assigned to the 45th Infantry Division, which was preparing for the anticipated Allied invasion of Japan. Fussell's recollections of hearing the news of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while waiting stateside to deploy would later form the basis of his essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb".

He was honorably discharged from the Army in 1946, returned to Pomona to finish his B.A. degree in 1946–1947, married fellow Pomona graduate Betty Harper in 1949, and completed his MA (1949) and PhD (1952) at Harvard University.

He began his teaching career at Connecticut College (1951–55) before moving to Rutgers University in 1955 and finally the University of Pennsylvania in 1983. He also taught at the University of Heidelberg (1957–58) and King's College London (1990–92). As a professor, he travelled widely with his family throughout Europe from the 1950s to '70s, taking Fulbright and sabbatical years in Germany, England and France.

Betty Fussell has described their marriage and its breakup in 1981 in her memoir, My Kitchen Wars. After Fussell moved from his home in Princeton, New Jersey, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he divorced Betty and married Harriette Behringer. He retired from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and lived with his wife in Oregon.

His 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. His son, Samuel Wilson Fussell, a writer and hunter in Montana, is the author of Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder.

Writing and teaching career

When he first entered college, Fussell intended a career in journalism. His plans changed when his sergeant was killed beside him in combat, about which he wrote in his memoir Doing Battle (1996). In his writings he opposed war, promoting instead a vision of rational enlightenment. He pointed to what he saw as the hypocrisy of governmental speech and the corruption of popular culture.