Taking issue with the popular perception that literary modernism emerged from the war, Hazel Hutchinson's The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War seeks to recast our understanding of the war's impact on literature by examining American writers whose “neutral status” permitted them “an experimental and polemical freedom” unavailable to contemporaries in belligerent nations (3). Besides examining writers from a nation often ignored by those who till the Great War's literary fields, Hutchinson also backs away from a familiar trope: since her emphasis is on writers who wrote during the war, none of her subjects (all of whom had some firsthand experience with conditions in war-torn Europe) served in the armed forces. Thus invested in individuals doubly marginalized in the literary canon, Hutchinson delivers a two-pronged argument. First, she dispenses with the ritual invocation of the “Lost Generation” (see her humorous takedown of that construct on 202), by arguing that “modernism is a deeply problematic term” to apply to World War I literature (4). Not only did modernism's canonical “wartime” texts appear long after the war had ended, but “the really creative moment, the ignition spark of innovation, happened during the war” (3–4). Scholars have gotten this story so wrong, Hutchinson's second argument maintains, because wartime writers’ shared conviction “in the power and the right of literature to sway public perspectives” and their concomitant insistence that writers had an obligation to act (thereby blurring the boundary between literature and the real world) have left them unpopular with contemporary literary critics because of academic trends. To that end, Hutchinson wisely points out that it seems a stretch to dismiss as propagandists those who presented bracing accounts of the war's carnage to a primarily genteel readership; even those who advocated for American entry into the war can hardly be seen as agents of the government when they were actually opposing the Wilson administration's stated policy of neutrality (56).

The evidentiary basis of these claims rests upon an analysis of what seven American literary figures produced during the early years of the war. Although most of these individuals (Edith Wharton, Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, and Henry James) are familiar—indeed, the title phrase comes from a disconcerted James's pen—the book devotes considerable time to three obscure writers (Ellen La Motte, Grace Fallow Norton, and Mary Borden), two of whom worked as nurses on the Western Front. Though they may have been less heralded, these three women produced some of the most searing prose on the war that one will encounter. Not surprisingly, this led American officialdom to regard all three of them with suspicion during the last year of the war; La Motte's wrenching account of nursing work, The Backwash of War, for example, was quickly suppressed upon American entry into the war and was not published again until the 1930s. Simply by introducing us to these forthright yet mostly forgotten writers, Hutchinson has performed an enormous service.

Throughout the book, one gets the sense that Hutchinson's analytical quarry extends beyond the interpretations of particular literary scholars. Instead, Hutchinson subtly challenges those of us who have lived in the shadow of nearly constant conflict since the turn of the century to rethink the relationship between war and literature altogether. While the uber-realist nature of much war writing can lead literary scholars to dismiss it because it is insufficiently “focused on the question of its own form” in an age that “has put ‘reality’ in quotation marks,” Hutchinson's view is that literature allows perceptive writers (like her subjects) to render creative portraits of fraught and complicated moments (like wars) that are nonetheless rooted in personal observations (239–40). Although her seven writers’ broader social impact is not fully explicated, Hutchinson maintains that we ask the wrong questions since the “overwhelming tendency in criticism of technically innovative poetry and prose … has been to focus on the play of signification, in preference to that which is signified”; these inquiries say “more about recent modes of reading” that are skeptical that words can remake the world at all “than about original modes of writing” (197). While some readers might regard this development as the legacy of a devastating conflict that shattered “the language of authority” that had done much to “[set] the war in motion,” Hutchinson decries this reading as fatalistic, by contending that even the “deterioration” of official language opened up space for “new perspectives and new possibilities for how words would be used in the future” (242).

Before rushing to purchase this work, historians in particular should keep a few things in mind. First, The War That Used Up Words is unabashedly a literary study. Although Hutchinson provides the readers with something more than close readings—her utilization of archival material for each of her protagonists is a strength of the book—the chapters revolve around her analysis of their artistic output. Lest visions of jargon-laden prose frighten historians away, they should be aware that Hutchinson writes well and displays an especial knack for judicious and forceful scholarly interventions that often work on multiple levels. At the same time, Hutchinson pays so much attention to her subjects’ literary strategies, and develops her own fine-grained readings of their texts at such length, that the book's larger argument sometimes vanishes. Hutchinson's knowledge of the relevant historiography is sketchy, with many of her citations to the work of historians being either outdated or idiosyncratic. Of course, historians skim theoretical insights from dense literatures in other disciplines, so Hutchinson is not alone in this regard. Still, historians who devote their lives to studying the war will probably find her unfamiliarity with the historiography frustrating. The pronounced refusal to engage with the findings of Henry May's classic The End of American Innocence (which does a much better job of tracing wartime literary innovations to the last years of the nineteenth century) weakens the book, for example, while many assertions in the main text will probably rile specialists. For example, her insistence that Wilsonian ideals “were clearly well-rehearsed among the American intellectual classes many months before they became official White House policy” comes without any citation whatsoever (139). Despite this deficiency, Hutchinson's passion and analytical ability leave the scale tilted in her favor; best of all, readers will find it difficult to resist tracking down the powerful poems and novels explored in this study.