Lewis, Wyndham
Related Category: English Literature, 20th cent. to the Present: Biographies
(Percy Wyndham Lewis)(wĭn´dəm), 1886–1957, English author and painter, born on a ship on the Bay of Fundy. With Ezra Pound, he was cofounder and editor of
Blast (1914–15), a magazine connected with
vorticism. Lewis's paintings, however, were not limited to the cubism of the vorticists; he produced many conventional works that gained him critical recognition. His paintings are in several museums, including the Tate Gallery, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. As an author, he is noted for his iconoclastic, quasi-philosophical novels and essays. Among his most important nonfiction works are
The Art of Being Ruled (1926),
Time and Western Man (1927), and
The Writer and the Absolute (1952). His finest novels are generally judged to be
The Revenge for Love (1937) and
Self Condemned (1954), but also of interest are
The Childermass (1928; rev. and continued as
The Human Age, 1955–56) and
The Apes of God (1930).
Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and
Rude Assignment (1950) are autobiographical.
See his letters, ed. by W. K. Rose (1964); P. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (2000); studies by T. Materer (1976), F. Jameson (1979), J. Meyers (1980), and S. E. Campbell (1988).
