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Overview: Mervyn Laurence Peake (9 July 1911-17 November 1968) was an English writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. The four works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J.R.R. Tolkien, but Peake’s surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien’s studies of mythology and philology.
Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children, stage and radio plays and Mister Pye, a relatively tightly structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero.
Peake first made his reputation as a painter and illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s, when he lived in London, and he was commissioned to produce portraits of well-known people. For a short time at the end of World War Two he was commissioned by various newspapers to depict war scenes. A collection of his drawings is still in the possession of his family. Although he gained little popular success in his lifetime, his work was highly respected by his peers and his friends included Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene. His works are now included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum and The National Archives. In 2008, The Times named Peake among their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
Rhymes Without Reason:
Mervyn Peake only ever illustrated one book in full colour: his own Rhymes Without Reason, a collection of nonsense verse issued during the austerity years of the Second World War and praised by John Betjeman as the outstanding publication of December 1944. But to describe the book as illustrated is misleading. Each picture looks out on a vibrantly coloured landscape more complex than the text it accompanies.
Selected Poems:
Selected Poems is a posthumous poetry collection published in 1972 by Faber and Faber.
The Glassblowers:
Mervyn Peake’s vivid poems, inspired by his experiences in a glassblowing factory in Britain during World War Two.
In 1943, Peake was commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to record his impressions in the Chance Brothers glassblowing factory in Smethwick, located just outside of Birmingham. Peake’s imagination wasactivated by the environment of grime and firelight and, in addition to the several painting and drawings he produced, developed these poems. During the war, Smethwick, being an industrial town, was targeted and bombed by the Germans on multiple occasions, since the Chance Brothers factory was producing glass for cathode ray tubes to used in radars.
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