John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys was a British philosopher, lecturer, novelist, literary critic, and poet, born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was Vicar of St Michael and All Angels Parish Church in 1871–1879. Powys appeared with a volume of verse in 1896 and a first novel in 1915, but gained success only with his novel Wolf Solent in 1929. He has been seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy, and Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934), and Maiden Castle (1936) have been called his Wessex novels. As with Hardy landscape is important. So is elemental philosophy in his characters' lives. In 1934 he published an autobiography. Powys had success as an itinerant lecturer, in England, and in 1905–1930 in the US, where he wrote many of his novels and had several first published. He moved to Dorset, England, in 1934 with his American partner, Phyllis Playter. In 1935 they moved to Corwen, Merionethshire in Wales, where he set two novels, then in 1955 to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he died in 1963.