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William Cowper Thomas Dale Biography & Facts

John Cowper Powys ( KOO-pər POH-iss; 8 October 1872 – 17 June 1963) was an English novelist, philosopher, lecturer, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the 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 to his works. So is elemental philosophy in his characters' lives. In 1934 he published an autobiography. His itinerant lectures were a success in England and in 1905–1930 in the United States, where he wrote many of his novels and had several first published. He moved to Dorset, England, in 1934 with a US partner, Phyllis Playter. In 1935 they moved to Corwen, Merionethshire, Wales, where he set two novels, and in 1955 to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he died in 1963. Biography Early life Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, in 1872, the son of the Reverend Charles Francis Powys (1843–1923), and Mary Cowper Johnson, granddaughter of Dr John Johnson, the cousin and close friend of the poet William Cowper. He came from a family of eleven children, many of whom were also talented. The family lived in Shirley between 1871 and 1879, briefly in Dorchester, Dorset and then they moved to Montacute, Somerset, where Charles Powys was vicar for thirty-two years. John Cowper Powys's two younger brothers Llewelyn Powys (1884–1939) and Theodore Francis Powys were well-known writers, while his sister Philippa Powys published a novel and some poetry. Another sister Marian Powys was an authority on lace and lace-making and published a book on this subject. His brother A. R. Powys was Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and published a number of books on architectural subjects. Powys was educated at Sherborne School and graduated from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, June 1894. On 6 April 1896 he married Margaret Lyon. They had a son, Littleton Alfred, in 1902. Powys's first employment was teaching in girls' schools in Brighton, and then Eastbourne. His first published works were two highly derivative collections of poetry published in the 1890s. He worked from 1898 as an Extension lecturer throughout England, for both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Lecturer in America Then from 1905 to the early 1930s, he lectured in the United States for the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching, gaining a reputation as a charismatic speaker. He spent his summers in England. During this time he travelled the length and breadth of the US, as well as into Canada. Powys's marriage was unsatisfactory, and Powys eventually lived a large part of each year in the USA, and had relationships with various women. An important woman in his life was the American poet Frances Gregg, whom he first met in Philadelphia in 1912. He was also a friend of the famous dancer Isadora Duncan. Another friend and an important supporter in America was the novelist Theodore Dreiser. In 1921 he met Phyllis Playter, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of industrialist and business man Franklin Playter. Eventually they established a permanent relationship, though he was unable to divorce his wife Margaret, who was a Catholic. However, he diligently supported Margaret and the education of their son. In the US he engaged in a public debate with the philosopher Bertrand Russell on marriage, and he also debated with the philosopher and historian Will Durant. Powys was also a witness in the obscenity trial of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, and was mentioned with approval in the autobiography of US feminist and anarchist, Emma Goldman. Powys would later share Goldman's support for the Spanish Revolution. His first novel Wood and Stone, which Powys dedicated to Thomas Hardy, was published in 1915. This was followed by two collections of literary essays Visions and Revisions (1915) and Suspended Judgment (1916). In Confessions of Two Brothers (1916), a work that also contains a section by his brother Llewelyn, Powys writes about his personal philosophy, something he elaborated on in The Complex Vision (1920), his first full length work of popular philosophy. He also published three collections of poetry between 1916 and 1922. Politically, Powys described himself as an anarchist and was both anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist: "Powys already regarded fascism and Stalinism as appalling, but different, totalitarian regimes". It was not until 1929, with the novel Wolf Solent, that Powys achieved any critical or financial success. In 1930 Powys and Phyllis moved from Greenwich Village in New York City to Hillsdale in rural upstate New York. One of Powys's most admired novels, A Glastonbury Romance, published in 1932, sold well, though he made little if any money from it because of a libel lawsuit. Another important work, Autobiography, was published in 1934. Settling in Wales Then in June 1934 Powys and Phyllis left America and moved to England, living first in Dorchester, the setting for the final Wessex novel, Maiden Castle, before eventually moving in July 1935 to Corwen, Denbighshire North Wales, with the help of the novelist James Hanley, who lived nearby. Corwen was historically part of Edeirnion or Edeyrnion and an ancient commote of medieval Wales, once a part of the Kingdom of Powys. There Powys immersed himself in Welsh literature, mythology and culture, including learning to read Welsh. The move inspired two major historical novels with Welsh settings, Owen Glendower (1941) and Porius (1951). Margaret Powys died in 1947, and his son Littleton Alfred in 1954. In May 1955 they moved, for the last time, to Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales. John Cowper Powys died in 1963 and Phyllis Playter in 1982. Works Poetry Powys's first published works were poetry: Odes and Other Poems (1896), Poems (1899), collections which have "echoes […] of Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, among contemporaries, and of Milton and Wordsworth and Keats". These were published with the assistance of his cousin Ralph Shirley, who was a director of William Rider and Son the publisher of them. In the summer of 1905 Powys composed "The Death of God" an epic poem "modelled on the blank verse of Milton, Keats, and Tennyson" that was published as Lucifer in 1956. There were three further volumes of poetry: Wolf's Bane (1916), Mandragora (1917) and Samphire (1922). The first two collections were published by Powys's manager G. Arnold Shaw. An unfinished, short narrative poem "The Ridge" was published in January 1963, shortly before Powys's death that June. In 1964 Kenneth Hopkins published John Cowper Powys: A Selection from his Poems and in 1979 the Welsh poet and critic Roland Mathias thought this side of Powys worthy of critical study and published Th.... Discover the William Cowper Thomas Dale popular books. Find the top 100 most popular William Cowper Thomas Dale books.