Hailed by critics and readers across the country for its wit, irreverence, and unflinching honesty, Doing Battle illuminates the events and experiences that changed not only Paul Fussell but his entire generation. Plucked from the pastoral middle-class sanctuary of Pasadena, where he grew up, twenty-year-old Fussell battle in southeastern France. While recovering from serious wounds he suffered in combat, Fussell vowed never to take orders again. His book makes clear how this newly subversive sensibility came to color all his later years -- as a Harvard Ph.D. student, as a professor of literature, and as a cultural commentator and author of such abidingly relevant books as Thank God for the Atom Bomb, Class. Wartime, and The Great War and Modern Memory. Doing Battle is at once a summing-up of one man's life and a profoundly thoughtful portrait of America's own search for identity in the second half of this century.