Eric Knight’s War: the Campaign for Anglo-American Understanding

Abstract

Eric Knight’s name is now virtually forgotten, although during his short life he attained a considerable measure of notoriety and literary success. His last book, This Above All, hailed by The Times Literary Supplement as ‘one of the outstanding novels of the war’¹ and by the Yale Review as ‘the finest novel of the war’,² was the best-selling work of fiction in America for several months during 1941.³ Even without the Book-of-the-Month imprimatur, the American edition sold roughly 200000 copies, and the book was speedily adapted into a major commercial film. During the less than two years that remained of his life after This Above All was published in the spring of 1941, Knight abandoned fiction for propaganda work in England and the United States, especially through the medium of film, in order to win over public opinion to the British cause and persuade Americans to take the war seriously.