Ernest Percival Rhys (/riːs/ REESS; 17 July 1859 – 25 May 1946) was a Welsh-English writer, best known for his role as founding editor of the Everyman's Library series of affordable classics.

[1] Rhys was born in Islington in north London, the son of John Rees (his spelling) and his English wife Emma Percival of Hockerill.

Shortly afterwards his father set up in the wine and spirits trade, working for Walter Gilbey in premises in Nott Square, Carmarthen, where before marriage he had been in training for the ministry.

[2][3] After home education with a governess, Rhys spent two years at Bishop's Stortford Grammar School as a boarder, leaving in poor health.

[6][8][4] On his own account, Rhys owed his first literary commission, and his interest in poetry, to Joseph Skipsey, whom he knew in Newcastle in the early 1880s.

[5][12][13] Rhys was one of a number of British socialists who visited Walt Whitman;[14] it followed a postal introduction in 1885 by William Michael Rossetti.

[20] Initially they lived in a cottage on Moel y Gamelin near Llangollen, but it proved impractical for the literary life, and they returned to London.

[2] In June of that year he met the poet John Davidson at a Sunday gathering in Hampstead held by William Sharp.

[27] Rhys also attended Yeats's evenings in the Woburn Buildings, St. Pancras, meeting there Maud Gonne and the young Rupert Brooke.

[29] Chapter XIX of Everyman Remembers describes an occasion at Rhys's home attended by Yeats, Davidson, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Hueffer and D. H. Lawrence.

[30] That year, Rhys and Ernest Radford were 1890s figures invited to the founding meeting of the poets' club set up by F. S. Flint and T. E.