The Two Worlds of William March

In the work of literary resurrection there is always a small act of defiance. The Two Worlds of William March by Roy S. Simmonds restores to view one of the most remarkable and least celebrated American writers of the twentieth century. With intelligence, restraint, and a keen eye for contradiction, Simmonds traces March’s path from Alabama beginnings through war, business success, and literary achievement. The result is more than a biography. It is an inquiry into the making of a writer whose novels continue to unsettle, disturb, and illuminate long after the fashions of his age have passed. 

What lingers is the paradox of William March himself. He was a man of outward accomplishment who remained drawn to the hidden regions of experience. He wrote memorably of war without glamorizing it, and of evil without simplifying it. Unlike so many public literary figures, he seemed to cultivate disappearance rather than celebrity. The silence around him became part of the story. Simmonds treats that silence not as a void but as evidence, revealing a complex and deeply observant mind at work beneath an unusually quiet life. 

The questions that occupied March remain with us. How well do we know ourselves? What lies beneath ordinary behavior? How does experience become art? For readers of Southern literature, literary biography, American history, war literature, psychology, Alabama culture, and twentieth-century fiction, this book offers both discovery and reconsideration. It will especially appeal to those who suspect that the most revealing stories are often hidden in plain sight.

Roy S. Simmonds (September 10, 1925 – November 10, 2000) was an English literary scholar and critic best known for his biographies on John Steinbeck, William March, and Edward O'Brien.

William March was born in 1893 as William Edward Campbell in Mobile, Alabama, and grew up in the picturesque hamlets of coastal Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. He won fame for his World War I novel Company K, whose success allowed him to devote himself to writing a large body of remarkable short fiction and novels that illuminate early twentieth-century southern life.