Thy Son Liveth: Messages from a Soldier to His Mother

Grace Duffie Boylan's first edition of Thy Son Liveth was written anonymously for fear that she would be ridiculed by her peers. This book is very different from her other works. It is non-fiction...about her son who had just been killed in Flanders fighting in World War I. Furthermore, it is an exact transcription of their conversations via Morse code on a telegraph machine...after he died. Boylan states: "What I felt to see my only son go to war is just what other mothers have felt, and will feel, as more and more young men are given to their country. But what I have to reveal is what every father and mother should know. And quite simply I am going to tell it. This book is published with the hope that it will give comfort to those of whom the war has demanded the bodies of their loved ones." The books message, as expressed in one of Bob's communications to his mother, is "There is no death. Life goes on without hindrance or handicap. The one thing that troubles the men who come here is the fact that the ones that loved them, are in agony." This revised edition of Thy Son Liveth: Messages From A Soldier To His Mother has been edited, redesigned and re-typeset for easier reading by the author's great grand-niece. Some of the jargon of the early 20th century has been carefully replaced with words used today, to facilitate understanding as well as to avoid the distraction of words whose meaning have subtly changed over time.

About the Author :
Grace Duffie Boylan was born in 1861 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, one of eleven children born to Phelix and Juliette (Smith) Duffie. Her father, who emigrated from Ireland, owned and operated the Dollar House Hotel in Kalamazoo and served as a Captain during the American Civil War. She attended Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard University) in Cambridge, Mass. and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. She began her career in Chicago as a journalist and reviewer, working as an art critic for the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean and writing a syndicated column called "High Roads for Happiness and Success" for The Chicago Journal. In addition to Thy Son Liveth, Boylan published children's books as well as several novels for adults, including the favorably reviewed "Kiss of Glory" and "The Supplanter." She also was well known as a writer of dialect poetry and patriotic verse with works like, "If Tam O'Shanter'd Had a Wheel, and Other Poems and Sketches" and "When the Band Played and other readings and recitations." In 1925 Boylan was featured in the publication, Prominent personages of the nation's capital: a work for newspaper and library reference, where she was described as "a woman of brilliant and magnetic personality, which is reflected both in her writings and in her public speaking." She was married to George Roe; to Robert Boylan, a well known newspaper reporter and horse racing expert; to St. George Kempson, editor of the New York Insurance Journal; and to Louis Napoleon Geldert, owner of the respected publication, The Insurance Herald of Louisville, Kentucky. Grace Duffie Boylan died in 1935 in Memphis, Tennessee. She was survived by her husband, Louis Geldert, her daughter, Clover Roscoe and her son, Malcolm Stuart Boylan. She had been a member of the Arts Club of Washington (DC), Authors League of America, Poetry Society of America and past president of the National League of Pen Women.