Our nation celebrated Veterans Day last week, and over the weekend, I read an interesting article about the falling rate of living veterans. When I was a child in 1980, 18% of American adults were veterans. Now? It's 6%. The end of the military draft in 1973 had a huge impact on this number, and the article got me thinking on how prominent veterans and the idea of war were in my youth. Both of my grandfathers served during World War II, along with most of my great-uncles. My dad is a veteran; he served in Thailand. Most of my friends' dads when I was growing up? Also veterans. To me, it felt like everyone was a veteran. It should come as no surprise, then, that many of Mississippi's older generations of authors are also veterans (or at least wrote about them). Let's take a quick look, shall we?
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- Shelby Foote was born in 1916 in Greenville. He was the author of a well-known trilogy of nonfiction books on the Civil War, as well as multiple novels. He joined the Mississippi National Guard after college and served in both the Army and the Marines during World War II, but did not see combat. You can read more about his time in service here and here.
- John Alfred Williams was born in 1925 in Jackson. He was a medical corpsman in the Navy during World War II. Williams has a "reputation as a supremely talented but undervalued writer" and wrote a large variety of work, including prize-winning novels and biographies, during his lifetime.
- Etheridge Knight was born in 1931 in Corinth. He served several years in the Army, including as a medical technician before and during the Korean War. Physical injuries and psychological trauma suffered during the war led to an opiate addiction and jail time, but Knight used this as a time to pivot toward the arts. While incarcerated, he spent his time reading and reaching out to active poets of the time. His first book of poetry was published as he was released from prison, and he went on to write several more.
Some Mississippi authors enlisted, but life had other plans. Richard Ford joined an ROTC program in college, only to be discharged due to hepatitis. William Faulkner enlisted in the Canadian Royal Air Force, but spent most of his time in quarantine from an influenza pandemic at the time in Toronto. World War I was over before he saw any time overseas, not that you could tell that from the stories he told and the photographs he had made. Faulkner did, however, lend a hand in shaping the young minds of future veterans. In one of his last public appearances before his death, Faulkner visited West Point. He gave a reading from his forthcoming book The Reivers and was a guest lecturer for several literature classes. The tape recordings of that visit have been transcribed and compiled in the book Faulkner at West Point.
