Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham 1882-1957
English novelist, painter and critic

He was born on a yacht off Amehurst, Nova Scotia, his father being American and his mother English, and he was educated at the Slade School of Art, London. With Ezra Pound he instituted the Vorticist movement and founded Blast (1914-15), the magazine which expounded their theories. From 1916 to 1918 he served on the Western Front, as a bombardier, then as a war artist. In the early 1930s, his right-wing sympathies were out of vogue. He emigrated to Canada at the beginning of World War II, returning to London in 1945. In 1951 he went blind. His novels, Tarr (1918), The Childermass (1928), and The Apes of God (1930) are powerful, vivid satires. Other important novels are The Revenge for Love (1937) and Self Condemned (1954), which is partly autobiographical. The Human Age (1955), a trilogy which was conceived with The Childermass and continued with Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (both 1955), was modelled in part on Dante and Milton. He also wrote political and critical essays, short stories, and the autobiographies Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude Assignment (1950). As a writer he has been ranked by some critics alongside James Joyce, and as a painter, he was one of the foremost experimentalists of his time in British art, and a highly skilled portraitist, painting, among others, Ezra Pound (1938-39), Edith Sitwell and T S Eliot.

Bibliography: J Meyers, The Enemy: a biography (1980)