Aldington's Death of a Hero is a book that, along with the novels A Farewell to Arms! Hemingway and Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” became a kind of manifesto of the “lost generation.” Work on the work took only fifty-one days. Maxim Gorky called Aldington’s “Death of a Hero” an “evil, full of terrible despair” book, testifying to the final decay of the bourgeois world. “This book is a funeral lament,” Aldington wrote, “a monument, perhaps, to unskilled, a generation that hoped fervently, fought honestly and suffered deeply.”