Simeon Strunsky

Professor Latimer's Progress Simeon Strunsky

"Professor Latimer's Progress" is one of the best novels of the war, dealing with war in the abstract. ... The " sentimental journey " of a middle-aged American scholar ... Excerpt: Latimer told the truth. He had been hard to live with ever since the first of August, 1914, although that was not the reason of his banishment to Sister Harriet's place up-state. He was being sent away for his own good, as far as possible from the War, which from the first day had laid hold of his soul's peace and put it to the rack. Every campaign in the three continents and on and under the seas had been fought simultaneously somewhere in Latimer. His heart was seldom out of the trenches. The war had mobilized him more completely than if it had placed a rifle in his hands and sent him to the firing line. It had not altered his habits; he was as fond as ever of rich foods, of wine on occasion, of his afternoon nap, of friendship, of loud and colored talk, of the buoyant, intellectual, epicurean, big-city existence in which his robust being was at ease after thirty years on a college campus.