Through the Wheat: A Novel of the World War I Marines

Fresh out of a Defiance, Ohio, high school, Thomas Boyd (1898-1935) joined the Marines to serve his country in the patriotic heat of the spring of 1917. In 1919 he came home from the war with a Croix de Guerre and a desire to write. He joined the *St. Paul News* as a journalist and opened a bookstore, whose patrons included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. *Through the Wheat* appeared to immediate acclaim, with F. Scott Fitzgerald calling it "a work of art" and "arresting." Boyd wrote five other works before he died in Vermont of a cerebral hemorrhage at age thirty-seven.