4. Joyce Kilmer Home

Sgt. Joyce Kilmer Sgt. Joyce Kilmer quit the Times to serve in France. Image via: U.S. Library of Congress

The death of Sergeant Joyce Kilmer, killed in action on July 30, 1918, shocked the nation. A beloved poet and writer, Kilmer enlisted in the Sixty-Ninth Regiment New York National Guard, later moving to Headquarters Company, 165th Infantry, Seventy-Seventh Division. Before the war, he and his wife, poet Aline Murray, resided at 134 Wadsworth Avenue in Washington Heights with their four young children. Kilmer worked at the New York Times on West Forty-Third Street. Kilmer had become a household name for his 1913 poem “Trees.”

In France, he was assigned to the intelligence section. A sniper cut him down in no-man’s land at the Ourcq River. He was thirty-one. Kilmer is interred with his fellow soldiers in Oise-Aisne American Cemetery.