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"It didn't take long before I was attracting strange looks by unsuspecting people around me. I couldn't control the urge to laugh as the story took form in my mind. Being a retired seafarer I could identify with some of the sketches"

--Thom Swennes

Biltmore Oswald
The Diary of a Hapless Recruit

Thorne Smith

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Biltmore Oswald may be seen as the original model for such later comic military characters as Popeye, Sad Sack, Beetle Bailey and Crock. Akin to his successors, Oswald was so hopelessly and shamelessly unqualified as a naval recruit, that the Navy accepted him simply to prove that if the Navy could make a sailor out of Biltmore, it could make a sailor out of anyone.

This volume is the compilation of a weekly series that Thorne Smith wrote for the Naval Reservist journal The Broadside during WW1. Biltmore, bungling and inept, faced the humiliations and absurdities of Navy life with hilarious consequences.

Drawn heavily from his wartime experience with the Navy, Smith's stories about Oswald were hugely popular among servicemen. The adventure stories about Biltmore Oswald, including the sequel Out 'O Luck: Biltmore Oswald Very Much At Sea, sold more than 70,000 copies.

Biltmore Oswald (1918) was Smith's literary debut.

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