Some Sort Of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis - Softcover

O'Keeffe, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0712673393 ISBN 13: 9780712673396

Publisher: Pimlico, 2001

Synopsis

page in front of him, testify to his final, triumphant burst of creativity. for what precisely it would be remarkably difficult to say.' Painter and draughtsman, novelist, satirist, pamphleteer and critic, Lewis's multifarious activities defy easy categorisation.He launched the only twentieth-century English avant garde movement, Vorticism, in 1914. His first novel, Tarr, was published in 1918. During the intervening World War, as an artillery officer at the third battle of Ypres, he gained his 'political education under fire'. Anti-war books of the 1930s argued against what he regarded as a war-mongering left-wing orthodoxy, and presented the case for the right. This placed him in the position somewhere between an advocate of appeasement and what looked uncomfortably like a Nazi sympathizer. Despite an admission, in 1939, that he had been wrong about Hitler, his reputation never recovered from the stigma of Fascism.After the Second World War, spent in penniless and bitter exile in Canada, he returned to London and, in the last decade of his life, received some measure of the success and recognition he had been denied for so long. It coincided, tragically, with the realisation that he was going blind. Visual expression denied him, he devoted all his remaining energies to writing. Seven books in as many years, written in laborious longhand when he was unable to see the

About this title

About the Author

Paul O'Keeffe is a lecturer and writer based in Liverpool. His acclaimed books include Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, A Genius for Failure: The Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon and, most recently, Waterloo: The Aftermath.

From the Inside Flap

of undoubted genius,” T.S. Eliot said of Wyndham Lewis, “…but genius for what precisely it would be remarkably difficult to say.” Painter and draughtsman, novelist, satirist, pamphleteer and critic, Lewis’s multifarious activities defied easy categorization.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pimlico
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0712673393
• ISBN 13: 9780712673396
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 704