Dominic Bevan Wyndham Lewis (1894-1969) was born in Wales
and educated at Oxford. Prior to serving in World War I, he
intended to pursue the legal profession; but after, having suffered
two bouts of shell shock and one of malaria, he set his sights on
journalism. In 1919, he became a columnist for The London
Daily Express under the pseudonym “Beach Comber.” These pieces
and those that he later wrote for The London Daily
Mail and The London News Chronicle capture Lewis’s
legendary wit and savage, though eloquent, impatience with modern
trends and are collected in the volumes At the Green
Goose (1923), At the Sign of the Blue
Moon (1924), At the Blue Moon Again (1925),
and On Straw and Other Conceits (1929). He wrote several
literary biographies, acclaimed for both their spirited
subjectivity and their attention to historical detail, taking on
subjects ranging from Rabelais and Molière to Boswell and Habsburg
Emperor Charles V. Mid-career, he also coauthored the story on
which Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much was
based.
Charles Lee (1870-1956) was born in London to an artistic
family who, throughout Lee’s life, heartily supported him in his
evolution as an intellectual, fiction writer, poet, playwright,
composer, and pianist. He received his BA from London University in
1889 and published his first novel, Widow Woman, in 1896. In poor
health, he traveled to Cornwall in 1900 for a brief recuperative
visit, staying on seven years, and discovering what would prove to
be his most enduring subject: Cornish life, its manners, its
landscapes, and its dogged resistance to modern times. In this
vein, he wrote four other novels—Our Little Town, Paul Carah
Cornishman, Dorinda’s Birthday, and Cynthia in the
West—as well as a number of short stories (recently collected
in Chasing Tales: The Lost Stories of Charles Lee); several
plays, journals, and musical scores; and a guide book, The
Vale of Lanherne. Later, after relocating to the London environs,
he worked as the senior editor for J. M. Dent, where, owing to his
talent for pruning and polishing prose, he came to be known as “the
man with the green pen.”
Billy Collins is the author of five books of poetry,
including Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and
Selected Poems, The Art of Drowning, The Apple That Astonished
Paris, and Questions About Angels. He is a regular
contributor to The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review,
Harper’s, and The Atlantic Monthly, among other
publications. He has received fellowships from the New York
Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and
the Guggenheim Foundation, and is the winner of numerous awards. In
1992, he was chosen by the New York Public Library to serve as
“Literary Lion,” and is currently serving as the 2001-2003 Poet
Laureate of the United States. A Distinguished Professor of English
at Lehman College (CUNY), Collins lives with his wife, Diane, in
northern Westchester County, New York
"An unholy, unmerciful, but richly humorous book."
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