ABSTRACT
Poet, novelist, librettist, critic, and writer for films and television, Slater (1902–56) worked early in his career for the ‘Observer’ and the ‘Daily Telegraph’. He had joined the Communist Party by 1930, and in 1934 became Editor-in-Chief of the ‘Left Review’, to which he also contributed when it was later edited by Edgell Rickword (see No. 70) and by Randall Swingler (see No. 77). During the war he was Head of Scripts in the Film Division of the Ministry of Information. He co-founded the periodical ‘Our Time’ in 1940, and founded the quarterly ‘Theatre Today’ in 1947. In addition to numerous plays and film scripts, and novels including ‘The Inhabitants’ (1948), he also wrote the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera ‘Peter Grimes’ (see ‘Peter Grimes and Other Poems’, 1946). Slater’s creative work is well represented by Poems and a Play in John Lucas (ed.), ‘The 1930s: A Challenge to Orthodoxy’, Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978.
