Thomas Boyd

Born in Defiance, Ohio, in 1898, Thomas Alexander Boyd was raised largely by his mother's family after his father died before he was born. While still young, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served in France during World War I, an experience that shaped much of his later writing.

After the war, Boyd built a career as a journalist and author. He became closely associated with literary life in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is best remembered for Through the Wheat (1923), a war novel widely noted for its stark, unsentimental picture of combat. He also wrote other fiction and nonfiction, drawing on both Midwestern life and modern history.

Boyd died in 1935 at just 36 years old. Though he is less widely known today than some of his contemporaries, his work still stands out for its plainspoken intensity and for the way it captures the physical and emotional cost of war.