Alun Lewis: Collected Stories - Hardcover

Alun Lewis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1854110128 ISBN 13: 9781854110121

Publisher: Seren, 1995

Synopsis

Alun Lewis (1915-1944) was one of the few great British writers of the Second World War. His early death at the age of twenty-eight robbed Wales of its most promising poet and story writer. Born and brought up near Aberdare in south Wales, the son of a teacher, he read history at Aberystwyth and Manchester. After a period of unemployment he became a teacher in south Wales, before enlisting in the Royal Engineers in 1940.

Although he had been writing since an early age, becoming a soldier had a stimulating effect on Lewis s writing: his first book of poems, Raiders Dawn, was published in 1942, and The Last Inspection, a collection of stories, appeared in the same year, alerting critics and editors to the arrival of a new war writer. Both books are characterised by vivid realism and emotional power.

Later in 1942 Lewis s new regiment, the South Wales Borderers, travelled to India. His experiences there are recreated in the beautiful poems of Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets and the stories and letters of In the Green Tree. On the reputation of these four books Alun Lewis is widely seen, with Keith Douglas, as the outstanding writer of World War Two.

Collected Stories reprints the war stories in their entirety for the first time. It also collects stories published in student magazines and newspapers such as The Guardian, together with several previously unseen. In bringing together all this material, editor Cary Archard shows Lewis s development from remarkable schoolboy writer to mature and established author whose stories appeared in magazines such as Horizon and Lilliput.

About this title

About the Author

Alun Lewis, (1915-1944), the remarkable poet and short story writer, died, aged 28, in Burma in the Second World War. Some critics see him as the last of the great Romantic poets, a twentieth century Keats. Others describe his poetry as the path from pre-war Yeats and Auden to post-war poets like Hughes and Gunn. In Wales there are those who think his greater versatility and finer intelligence place him above his contemporaries Dylan Thomas and R.S. Thomas. Born and brought up near Aberdare in south Wales, Lewis read history at Aberystwyth and Manchester. After a brief period teaching and despite pacifist inclinations, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers. He later joined the South Wales Borderers and was posted to India. Becoming a soldier had a stimulating effect on Lewis's writing: Raiders' Dawn, a collection of forty-seven poems, appeared in 1942 and early in 1943, The Last Inspection, a book of short stories, was published, both to considerable critical acclaim. Lewis died in an accident on active service in Burma in 1944. His second volume of poems, Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets, was published in 1945 and his Indian short stories, together with some letters, in In The Green Tree (1948). Morlais, Lewis' previously unpublished novel from the 1930s, was published by Seren in July 2015.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seren
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1854110128
• ISBN 13: 9781854110121
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Cary Archard