To encounter Powys is to arrive at the very fount of creation.--Henry Miller

"To encounter Powys is to arrive at the very fount of creation."

(Henry Miller)

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963)

 

“...a cross between an aged werewolf and a puzzled child.”

(Margaret Drabble)

"A genius – a fearless writer, who writes with reckless passion."

(Margaret Drabble)

John Cowper Powys was a prolific novelist, essayist, letter writer, poet and philosopher, and a writer of enormous scope, complexity, profundity and humour.

A powerful orator, he spent over 30 years as an itinerant lecturer in the U.S., during which time he wrote his first four novels. In 1930, he retired to upstate New York and turned to full-time writing: it was here that he produced such masterpieces as his Autobiography, A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands.

He returned to Great Britain in 1934, settling in North Wales in 1935, where he wrote the historical novels Owen Glendower and Porius, the critical studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, and The Brazen Head.

Other notable novels are Wolf Solent and Maiden Castle: ...rich in characterization, psychological analysis, and evocation of place.

George Steiner once claimed that Powys was the only twentieth-century English writer on a par with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Margaret Drabble, the distinguished English novelist, believes, “we need to pay attention to this man.” The world of his novels, she says, is “densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien’s, but it is as compelling, and it has more air.”

(All above text courtesy of the Official Website of The Powys Society)

(From noted writer Lawrence Millman): "What struck me when I reread Wolf Solent recently was not its weirdness but its compassion for the down-and-out, the aberrant, and the misbegotten. What also struck me was its casual attitude toward polymorphous sex. 'Natural or unnatural,' one of the characters says, 'it's nature. It's mortal man's one great solace before he's annihilated.' I can't imagine anyone else of Powys's generation writing those words. Certainly not D. H. Lawrence, who compared with Powys was a reactionary about matters of the flesh."