J. W. N. Sullivan

John William Navin Sullivan (1886–1937) was an English popular science writer and literary journalist, and the author of a study of Beethoven.

He wrote some of the earliest non-technical accounts of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and was known personally to many important writers in London in the 1920s, including Aldous Huxley, John Middleton Murry, Wyndham Lewis, Aleister Crowley and T. S. Eliot.

Sullivan fictionalized his origins, and at one point persuaded Aldous Huxley that he was born in Ireland and had attended Maynooth with James Joyce.

Facts about his early years are few, but he appears to have left school at a young age and worked from 1900 onwards at a Telegraph company; the directors recognised his outstanding mathematical abilities and paid for him to study part-time at the Northern Polytechnic Institute.

Through Murry he was introduced to Ottoline Morrell's salon at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, and it was through this network that he became known to many literary figures, including T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s his main journalistic outlets were more populist journals such as The Outlook, John O’London’s Weekly, and Everyman.

Turner's novel The Duchess of Popocatepetl (1939), described there as "gay, romantic, brilliant... a man of powerful mind, capable of sharp penetration, rapid co-ordination, and lucid exposition altogether removed from the ordinary.