Death of a Hero (1929), which Aldington called a "jazz novel," was his semi-autobiographical response to the war. He started writing it almost immediately after the armistice was declared. The novel condemned Victorian materialism as a cause of the tragedy and waste of the war. Rejectionist, an "Expressionist scream", it was commended by Lawrence Durrell as "the best war novel of the epoch". It was developed mostly while Aldington was living on the island of Port-Cros in Provence, building on the manuscript from a decade before. Opening with a letter to the playwright Halcott Glover, the book takes a satirical, cynical, and critical stance on Victorian and Edwardian cant.Michael Copp (editor), An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington (2002), p. 18. Published in September 1929, by Christmas it had sold more than 10,000 copies in England alone, part of a wave of war remembrances from writers such as Remarque, Sassoon, and Hemingway. The book was quickly translated into German and other European languages. In Russia the book was taken to be a wholesale attack on bourgeois politics, "the inevitable result of the life which had preceded it", as Aldington wrote. "The next one will be much worse". It was praised by Gorky as revolutionary, and the book, along with Aldington's later fiction, received huge Russian distribution. Aldington was, however, fiercely non-partisan in his politics, despite his passion for iconoclasm and feminism.Richard Aldington (1998). Death of a Hero, Dundurn Press, p. xi.
Death of a Hero (1929), which Aldington called a "jazz novel," was his semi-autobiographical response to the war. He started writing it almost immediately after the armistice was declared. The novel condemned Victorian materialism as a cause o.f the tragedy and waste of the war. Rejectionist, an "Expressionist scream", it was commended by Lawrence Durrell as "the best war novel of the epoch". It was developed mostly while Aldington was living on the island of Port-Cros in Provence, building on the manuscript from a decade before. Opening with a letter to the playwright Halcott Glover, the book takes a satirical, cynical, and critical stance on Victorian and Edwardian cant.Michael Copp (editor), An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington (2002), p. 18. Published in September 1929, by Christmas it had sold more than 10,000 copies in England alone, part of a wave of war remembrances from writers such as Remarque, Sassoon, and Hemingway. The book was quickly translated into German and other European languages. In Russia the book was taken to be a wholesale attack on bourgeois politics, "the inevitable result of the life which had preceded it", as Aldington wrote. "The next one will be much worse" It was praised by Gorky as revolutionary, and the book, along with Aldington's later fiction, received huge Russian distribution. Aldington was, however, fiercely non-partisan in his politics, despite his passion for iconoclasm and feminism.Richard Aldington (1998). Death of a Hero, Dundurn Press, p. xi.