Powys, John Cowper (1872-1963)

English novelist. His mystic and erotic books include Wolf Solent (1929) and A Glastonbury Romance (1933); Owen Glendower (1940) is the most successful of his historical novels. He was one of six brothers, including Theodore Francis Powys (1875-1953) who is best known for the novel Mr Weston's Good Wine (1927), and Llewelyn Powys who wrote essays, novels, and autobiographical works.

John Cowper Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, and was educated at Sherborne and Cambridge. He was a university extension lecturer for over 40 years, spending 30 of them in the USA. Though he began his literary career as a poet, publishing several collections of verse including Wolfsbane Rhymes (1916) and Samphire (1922), he is chiefly known for his long novels. His writing has been called realistic, but his vast, panoramic novels are difficult to characterize: he has much in common with D H Lawrence and L H Myers in his emphasis on the importance of passion in modern life.

He also published many volumes of literary criticism and social philosophy. Among his books of essays are The Meaning of Culture (1929), In Defence of Sensuality (1930), The Pleasures of Literature (1938), and The Art of Growing Old (1944). He wrote studies of Dostoevsky (1947) and Rabelais (1948).

More of his books were reissued in the late 1990s and his popularity was revived.