The first volume, Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man was published in 1928; the second, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, in 1930. The autobiography was completed in 1945 with the publication of Siegfried's Journey. The autobiography is a major achievement. The first volume, in particular, is significant as an elegy for the life of rural England that ended catastrophically with World War I.

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During the 1920s and early 1930s, he engaged in several affairs, notably a romance with the future Nazi Prince Philip of Hesse, and a longer relationship with poet and decorator Stephen Tennant. These were tempestuous relationships in which Sassoon often felt himself the victim of rejection and cruelty.

In December 1933, he married Hester Gatty, a woman twenty years younger than himself, and in 1936, the couple had a son, George. By many accounts, Sassoon treated Gatty as badly as he had been treated by many of his male lovers, and by 1945, they were divorced, though Gatty returned to nurse Sassoon later in his life when he became ill.

The rest of Sassoon's life passed in quiet conventionality. He converted to Catholicism during the 1950s, and died on September 1, 1967, at Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, England. He was buried at St. Andrew's Church in Mells, Somerset, England.

Although his war poetry continues to find readers, Sassoon today is remembered primarily for his autobiography.

In its first century of existence, gay male autobiography has become increasingly more open, frank, and unapologetic.

The Bloomsbury circle's open acceptance of erotic license and hostility toward social convention are important elements in the history of homosexuality among the English upper classes in the first half of the twentieth century.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

Twentieth-century efforts to reform British law and public opinions about homosexuality met with mixed results, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century the United Kingdom has emerged as a leader in recognizing the rights of its glbtq citizens.

From ancient times, homoerotic writing has been a notable part of the literature of war.

A twentieth-century British editor who fostered the careers of a number of important gay writers, J. R. Ackerley also wrote a small but significant body of gay literature that includes memoirs and drama.

The English poet Rupert Brooke was bisexual, reflecting his sexuality in both his letters and his poetry.

Edward Carpenter, a champion of both women's and homosexuals' liberation, was one of the great socialist visionaries of England at the turn of the twentieth century.

Although Coward's plays are about heterosexual couples, they are written in the language and spirit of camp and reject traditional domestic values.

One of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century and a tireless defender of humane values, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

Although he chose celibacy, Lawrence of Arabia formed close romantic attachments to young men.

Charlotte Mew's poetry encodes the emotional pain of hiding her lesbian identity in a world of compulsory heterosexuality.

English war poet Wilfred Owen combined the homoeroticism latent in the elegy tradition with precise observation of the horror of trench warfare.

Throughout her life, poet and novelist Edith Sitwell surrounded herself with gay men, some of whom became her artistic collaborators. Although it is not clear that she ever experienced a sustained sexual relationship with anyone of either sex, her closest emotional bond was with another woman.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.