John Cowper Powys (/ˈkuːpər ˈpoʊɪs/ KOO-pər POH-iss; 8 October 1872 – 17 June 1963) was an English novelist, philosopher, lecturer, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the parish church in 1871–1879.

He has been seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy, and Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934), and Maiden Castle (1936) have been called his Wessex novels.

The family lived in Shirley between 1871 and 1879, briefly in Dorchester, Dorset and then they moved to Montacute, Somerset, where Charles Powys was vicar for thirty-two years.

[5] His brother A. R. Powys was Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and published a number of books on architectural subjects.

[10] Then from 1905 to the early 1930s, he lectured in the United States for the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching, gaining a reputation as a charismatic speaker.

[19] Powys was also a witness in the obscenity trial of James Joyce's novel Ulysses,[20] and was mentioned with approval in the autobiography of US feminist and anarchist, Emma Goldman.

[32] In the summer of 1905 Powys composed "The Death of God" an epic poem "modelled on the blank verse of Milton, Keats, and Tennyson" that was published as Lucifer in 1956.

[35] Belinda Humfrey, suggests that "[p]erhaps Powys's best poems are those given to Jason Otter in Wolf Solent and Taliessin in Porius.

While he was a famous lecturer and published a variety of both fiction and non-fiction regularly from 1915, it was not until he was in his early fifties, with the publication of Wolf Solent in 1929, that he achieved critical and financial success as a novelist.

[38] In the Preface he wrote for the 1961 Macdonald edition of the novel Powys states: "Wolf Solent is a book of Nostalgia, written in a foreign country with the pen of a traveller and the ink-blood of his home".

[46] All the same, despite his indebtedness to the Victorian novel and his enthusiasm for Hardy, Walter Scott and such lesser figures as Ainsworth, Powys was clearly a modernist.

[47] He has affinities also with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Pater, Marcel Proust, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson.

[48] It is clear from Powys's diaries that his new-found success was much helped by the stability that his relationship with Phyllis Playter gave him and her frequent advice on his work in progress.

[49] A Glastonbury Romance sold particularly well in its British edition, though this was of little avail as it was the subject of an expensive libel case brought by Gerard Hodgkinson, the owner of the Wookey Hole Caves, who felt himself identifiably and unfairly portrayed in the character of Philip Crow.

Not only is A Glastonbury Romance concerned with the legend that Joseph of Arimathea brought the Grail, a vessel containing the blood of Christ, to the town, but the further tradition that King Arthur was buried there.

[52] Furthermore one of the novel's main characters, the Welshman Owen Evans, introduces the idea that the Grail has a Welsh (Celtic), pagan, pre-Christian origin.

While Welsh mythology was already important in A Glastonbury Romance and Maiden Castle it became still more so after he and Phyllis Playter moved to Corwen, Wales, in 1935, first in the minor novel Morwyn or The Vengeance of God (1937).

[60][61] In 1944, Powys wrote an anti-vivisection article for Leo Rodenhurst's The Abolitionist, a paper published by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection.

[70] This was in fact a time of major transition in the history of Britain, with the replacing of Roman traditions with Saxon rule and the conversion of the British to Christianity.

[71] There are again, as with Owen Glendower, parallels with contemporary history: "The Dark Ages and the 1930s are the periods of what Powys, in Yeatsian phrase calls 'appalling transition'.

The landscape and the intimate relations that characters have with the elements, including the sky, wind, plants, animals, and insects, have great significance in all Powys's works.

[79] Words such as mysticism[80] and pantheism[81] are sometimes used in discussing Powys's attitude to nature, but what he is concerned with is an ecstatic response to the natural world, epiphanies such as Wordsworth describes in his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality",[82] with an important difference that Powys believes that the ecstasy of the young child can be retained by an adult who actively cultivates the power of the imagination.

[83] Some have compared this to Zen and such contemplative practices,[84] and for Powys, and the protagonists of his novels who usually resemble him, the cultivation of a psycho-sensuous philosophy is as important as the Christian religion was for an earlier generation.

[86] Glen Cavaliero, in John Cowper Powys: Novelist, describes the novels written after Porius as "the spontaneous fairy tales of a Rabelaisian surrealist enchanted with life", and finds Atlantis (1954) "the richest and most sustained" of them.

While he sets out to be totally frank about himself, and especially his sexual peculiarities and perversions, he largely excludes any substantial discussion of the women in his life.

[94] Periodically, over almost 50 years, starting with Confessions of Two Brothers in 1916, Powys wrote works that present his personal philosophy of life.

[41] Taking advantage of his reputation as an itinerant lecturer, Powys published in 1915 a collection of literary essays, Visions and Revisions.

The film director John Boorman wrote in his autobiography of contemplating a movie adaptation of A Glastonbury Romance early in his career.

[110] In 1958, "Powys was presented with the Bronze Plaque of the Hamburg Free Academy of Arts in recognition of his outstanding services to literature and philosophy".

[111] Then on 23 July 1962, aged 90, he gained an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in absentia from the University of Wales at Swansea, as "patriarch of the literature of these islands".