Lewis, Wyndham (redirected from Wyndham Lewis)

Lewis, Wyndham (Percy Wyndham Lewis) (wĭn`dəm), 1886–1957, English author and painter, born on a ship on the Bay of Fundy. With Ezra Pound, he was cofounder and editor of Blast (1914–15), a magazine connected with vorticism. Lewis's paintings, however, were not limited to the cubism of the vorticists; he produced many conventional works that gained him critical recognition. His paintings are in several museums, including the Tate Gallery, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. As an author, he is noted for his iconoclastic, quasi-philosophical novels and essays. Among his most important nonfiction works are The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), and The Writer and the Absolute (1952). His finest novels are generally judged to be The Revenge for Love (1937) and Self Condemned (1954), but also of interest are The Childermass (1928; rev. and continued as The Human Age, 1955–56) and The Apes of God (1930). Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude Assignment (1950) are autobiographical.

Bibliography

See his letters, ed. by W. K. Rose (1964); P. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (2000); studies by T. Materer (1976), F. Jameson (1979), J. Meyers (1980), and S. E. Campbell (1988).

---

Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham

(born Nov. 18, 1882, on a yacht near Amherst, Nova Scotia, Can.—died March 7, 1957, London, Eng.) English artist and writer. The founder and principal exponent of Vorticism, Lewis began a short-lived Vorticist review titled Blast in 1914. His first novel, Tarr, appeared in 1918. The Childermass (1928) was followed by the huge satirical novel The Apes of God (1930) and The Revenge for Love (1937). In the 1930s he produced some of his most noted paintings, including The Surrender of Barcelona (1936). He also wrote essays, short stories, and two admired memoirs. Notorious in the 1930s for championing fascism, he later recanted those beliefs.