Why Was I Killed

(, Main)

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In this moving and thought-provoking novel, the spirit of a dead soldier asks: Why was I killed From each individual he questions, he receives a different answer. The English gentleman, the mechanic, the priest, the mother robbed of her son, the man who fought in Spain for each of these people the war in which the soldier lost his life has a different meaning. Whether they believe it to be a pointless horror, an outcome of sinister politics, or an inevitable aspect of history, each of these individuals feels himself to have been cruelly robbed by war. But the soldiers own vision and revelation at the moment of his death offers an alternative interpretation of the consequences of war. Highly acclaimed when it was first published in 1943, Why Was I Killed will continue to be relevant as long as humans go to war. A striking and rare work of imagination. Edwin Muir The beauty of his prose, unsurpassed by any living English writer springs from a sound moral core and from an intelligence which operates with the keenest edge upon our prejudices, our swollen abstractions, our confused thinking. C. Day Lewis

Author Bio

Reginald Ernest [Rex] Warner (1906-1986) was a poet, novelist, classicist and translator. While studying classics and English at Oxford, he became involved with a group of young writers including W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. After leaving Oxford he was a teacher and travelled in Egypt before publishing his first novel in 1937, The Wild Goose Chase. He was the director of the British Institute in Athens in the 1940s and then went on to teach in various American universities. Later in life he wrote many novels and works of non-fiction about Ancient Greece and Rome, including Imperial Caesar, which won the 1960 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and as well as translating numerous classical works.