Routledge Library Editions: Wyndham Lewis

Book excerpt: The 3 volumes in this set, originally published between 1963 and 1980 include the first biography of Wyndham Lewis (1882 - 1957) by the award winning biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, and 2 volumes edited by personal friends of Wyndham Lewis which give a unique insight into the man, his output and his concern with the conflict between the artist-intellectual and the rest of society. Lewis is arguably one of the major intellectual figures of the 20th Century. Equally talented as a writer and painter, Lewis was innovative and controversial and well-known as the driving force behind Vorticism, the avant-garde movement that flourished in London before the First World War. A versatile painter, Lewis’ literary output was prodigous and he mastered a variety of genres – novels, poetry, philosophy, sociology, travel writing, literary and art critic. A leading revolutionary in British painting and a writer of creative genius, Wyndham Lewis also knew personally Augustus John, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, who called Lewis ‘the most fascinating personality of our time’.