Biography

In 1937, James Neugass, a poet and novelist praised in the New York Times, joined 2,800 other passionate young Americans who traveled to Spain as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—an unlikely mix of artists, journalists, industrial workers, and intellectuals united in their desire to combat European fascism.

Isidore James Newman Neugass was born in New Orleans, January 29, 1905. He came from a well to do Jewish family. Neugass began writing as a teenager. “I have been writing poetry since I was seventeen,” he stated in 1933, “lots of it and nothing but it.” James Neugass attended Yale, Harvard, and Oxford and worked as a book reviewer, shoe salesman, social worker, and fencing coach before shipping off to Spain when he was 32 to be an ambulance driver for the American Medical Bureau to Save Spanish Democracy.

Although rumors persisted over the years that Neugass had written a memoir, the manuscript did not come to light for sixty years, until a bookseller discovered it among papers in a New England house once occupied by the radical critic and editor Max Eastman. The memoir combines fast-paced accounts of darting onto battlefields to pick up the wounded with elegiac renderings of days spent “on alert” in an ever-changing series of sharply observed Spanish towns, enduring that most difficult of wartime activities: waiting.

Co-editors and ALBA board members Peter N. Carroll and Peter Glazer worked with the Neugass family and New Press to publish the memoir now for the first time. War Is Beautiful (2008) is poised to take its place alongside works by Erich Maria Remarque, Irène Némirovsky, Wilfred Owen, and George Orwell as a transcendent contemporaneous rendering of wartime life.

Publications

War Is Beautiful (2008) Rain of Ashes (1949)

ALB Archival Materials

Images

Jim Neugass

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