Thomas Boyd
Thomas Boyd was an American author born on July 3, 1898, near Defiance, Ohio. He had a modest upbringing before he enlisted in the Marine Corps at eighteen to serve in World War I, where he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his bravery. After the war, Boyd settled in St. Paul, Minnesota, transitioning into journalism and becoming a literary editor, while also engaging with notable contemporary writers like Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His literary debut, "Through the Wheat," published in 1923, critically explored the disillusionment of war through the experiences of an Everyman character, revealing the stark realities of combat and survival. Boyd continued to address themes of authority and economic disparity in subsequent works such as "The Dark Cloud" and "Samuel Drummond." In the 1930s, he became politically active, joining the Communist Party and running for governor of Vermont. His final novel, "In Time of Peace," further examined the struggles for dignity amidst the challenges of the Great Depression. Boyd's life was cut short by a stroke in 1935, yet his writings remain significant for their empathetic portrayal of both the horrors of war and social injustices.
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Subject Terms
Thomas Boyd
Fiction Writer, Biographer
- Born: July 3, 1898
- Birthplace: Defiance, Ohio
- Died: January 27, 1935
- Place of death: Ridgefield, Connecticut
Biography
Thomas Boyd, born outside Defiance, Ohio, on July 3, 1898, enjoyed a quiet rural boyhood. Lured by the promise of adventure, he quit high school at eighteen to volunteer for service in World War I. He saw considerable action with the marines and was awarded the Croix de Guerre before sustaining injuries in a gas shell explosion that sent him home in July, 1919. Settling in St. Paul, Minnesota, and working as a journalist for the Saint Paul Daily News, Boyd was soon the paper’s literary editor as well as part owner of the Kilmarnock Bookstore, contacts that introduced Boyd to regional writers, among them Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Determined to write about his war experiences, Boyd wrote Through the Wheat, initially rejected by Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s but given a second look at the urging of Fitzgerald. In 1923, the novel was published to generous critical praise. With its unadorned prose and graphic detailing, Boyd’s depiction of the experiences of William Hicks, a sort of Everyman who enlists in the marines to find the grand romance of war, exposed war as Boyd’s generation had found it: relentless, pointless engagements in between long hours of boredom. Hicks, by the end of the novel, is numbed, an antihero who finds heroism itself ironic and who is content with survival in a war that has rendered the universe absurd.
Quickly, Boyd followed Through the Wheat with The Dark Cloud ()1924 and Samuel Drummond (1925), novels that demonstrated his concern with the problems of unregulated authority, the unreasonable distribution of wealth and privilege, the limitless greed of the moneyed class, and the growing irrelevancy of the individual in an emerging technological world. He returned to war in a collection of short stories, The Points of Honor, as well as in well-received biographies on the Revolutionary War figures Anthony Wayne and Light-Horse Harry Lee.
Divorcing his first wife, the novelist Margaret Woodward Smith, and marrying Ruth Fitch Bartlett, Boyd moved to Vermont, where he became politically active on behalf of workers devastated by the Depression. He joined the Communist Party and was its candidate for Vermont governor in 1934. He returned to New York City to shepherd the publication of his sequel to Through the Wheat. Titled In Time of Peace (1935), it depicts Hicks struggles for the dignity of rewarding work in Depression-era Chicago and must learn that the grim principle of survival he first intuited in Europe extends as well to the urban battlefields of America.
Even as he was negotiating with editor Maxwell Perkins over a new manuscript that Perkins had returned, Boyd suffered a stroke in a cab and died two weeks later, on January 27, 1935, from complications following a cerebral hemorrhage. Although never enjoying the sales or critical reputation of other realistic chroniclers of World War I such as E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos, Boyd remains a disturbing voice whose generous compassion for the individual conveys the horrors of both modern warfare and economic inequities.