ABSTRACT
Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), who is rated perhaps more as an artist than as a writer, first exhibited his work in 1911, then at the Post-Impressionist exhibition organized by Roger Fry in 1912. In 1914 he brought out the first of only two issues of ‘Blast’, the Vorticist review, and later edited the equally short-lived ‘Tyro’ (1921–2) and ‘Enemy’ (1927–9). Acidulous and extravagantly contentious, he attacked his friends T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce; reasonably regarded as Fascist in his opinions, he contributed to Oswald Mosley’s ‘Action’, though he never joined the quasi-Fascist ‘New Party’ and described himself in 1931 as ‘partly communist and partly fascist, with a distinct streak of monarchism in my marxism, but at bottom anarchist, with a healthy passion for order’. His books include ‘Tarr’ (1918), ‘Hitler’ (1931), ‘The Apes of God’ (1930), and ‘Men Without Art’ (1934).
