Paul Fussell,critic, essayist, and cultural commentator, has recently won the H. L. Mencken Award of the Free Press Association. Among his books areThe Great War and Modem Memory,which in 1976 won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award;Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars; Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War;and, most recently,BAD or, The Dumbing of America.His essays have been collected inThe Boy Scout Handbook and Other ObservationsandThank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays.He lives in Philadelphia, where he teaches English at the University of Pennsylvania.