After graduating, he embarked on a career as a lecturer in English literature, mainly in the United States, where he spent most of the following fifteen years and became part of a lively American literary scene.

After the Second World War, Wilkinson caused a minor sensation when, at Crowley's cremation in December 1947, in accordance with the deceased's expressed wishes, he recited the latter's pagan poem "Hymn of Pan" and other sacrilegious texts – although he was not himself a follower.

[2] At the time of his son's birth, Wilkinson senior was running the Aldeburgh Lodge preparatory school,[n 1] where Louis received his early education.

[6] Wilkinson discovered this address and in December 1898 wrote to the exile, ostensibly to ask for permission to mount a dramatised version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

[14] Wilkinson's anti-imperialist views and his opposition to the Boer War added to his unpopularity with the authorities, as did his continued championing of Wilde, a large photograph of whom decorated his rooms.

[1][15] After the journalist and former Liberal MP Henry Labouchère had campaigned in his journal Truth against what he called "the Varsity Star Chamber", Wilkinson was admitted in 1902 to St John's College, Cambridge.

[14] John Cowper Powys, Llewelyn's eldest brother, described Wilkinson at this time as "a resplendent personage", tall, powerfully built and handsome, "full of an irresponsible and heathen zest for adventure".

[21] During his final year at Cambridge, in 1905, Wilkinson wrote and published his first novel, The Puppet's Dallying, using the pseudonym "Louis Marlow", a name which he would resurrect as a mature writer in the 1920s.

[n 3] Wilkinson was influenced by John Cowper Powys into trying his hand at university extension lecturing,[25] and accepted an invitation to make a six-month American lecture-tour on English literature in the year 1905–06.

The honeymoon was nevertheless eccentric, as the couple were joined in Venice by John Cowper and Llewelyn Powys, where the four behaved, according to one writer, so scandalously that they were arrested, and almost thrown out of the city.

[37] In 1916 he wrote the pamphlet "Blasphemy and Religion", in which a fictitious lord and his son discuss two contrasting recent works by John Cowper Powys and his brother T.F: "Wood and Stone" and "The Soliloquy of a Hermit".

[23][n 6] Wilkinson had by this time become acquainted with Frank Harris, the Irish-born journalist, editor and biographer of Wilde, who after a turbulent career in Britain had moved to America at the outset of World War I and later taken American citizenship.

[48] Since 1915 Wilkinson had been associated with New York's Greenwich Village literary set, and acted as an unofficial mentor to the future poet, essayist and scholar Kenneth Burke.

Wilkinson was a constructive critic of the younger man's early literary efforts, advised him what to read, and introduced him to Theodore Dreiser and other established writers.

In time Burke developed an enthusiasm for the "moderns" was not encouraged by Wilkinson: "I'm sick to death of the whole blasted lot of them", the latter wrote, adding that James Joyce was absurdly overrated.

[51] The Observer's reviewer thought the story of Love by Accident (1929), turning on the protagonist's self-imposed celibacy, was an inadequate vehicle for the book's more serious injunctions against warmongers and literary censorship.

[54] When The Lion Took Fright (1930) appeared a year later, The Observer's critic praised the author's probing wit in handling "so disagreeable a theme" (the love of an adolescent girl for an unscrupulous older man).

[56] In 1934, Wilkinson published a different kind of book, the autobiographical novel Swan's Milk, in which he represents himself as "Dexter Foothood", and depicts many of his real-life acquaintances, including the Powys brothers, Maugham, Oscar Browning[n 8] and others.

A contemporary review found the book "extraordinarily vivid", adding "Some may find Mr Marlow's revelations of the lives disturbing, for reticence is no part of the Powys code".

[60] After Welsh Ambassadors, Wilkinson was a regular visitor to the Swiss sanatorium where Llewelyn Powys, his closest friend among the brothers, was slowly succumbing to tuberculosis – he died in December 1939.

[62] In 1944 Wilkinson produced his single venture into the science-fiction genre, The Devil in Crystal, described by The Observer's Alan Pryce-Jones as "an odd little fantasy",[63] in which the protagonist, through a warp in time, is able to relive a part of his past life.

[65] Punch's critic observed that the ingenious form of the book allowed the author to portray himself, as Foothood, rather more favourably than might have been possible in a conventional autobiography.

[66] When Crowley, in failing health and virtually penniless, was in need of a new home in 1945, Wilkinson was instrumental in finding him a place in Nethercott, a large boarding-house in the English south coast resort of Hastings.

The attendant press sensationalised the event with lurid headlines, suggesting that a Black Mass had taken place, and the scandalised local authority announced that steps would be taken to prevent any recurrence of such a ceremony.

The book was reviewed critically by the subject's great-great-grandniece, Vita Sackville-West, who, far from defending her distant kinsman, upbraided Wilkinson for his whitewashing of the viscount, long a pariah in her family.

She characterised Sackville as "obstinate, arrogant, coarse-grained, lacking all statesmanlike vision, almost every word and act reported of him contradicts the case that Mr Marlow so gallantly endeavours to put up".

In 1953 he produced his final full-length work, Seven Friends, a compendium of brief lives of some of his more remarkable acquaintances: Wilde, Crowley, Harris, Maugham and the three Powys brothers.

[75] In 1958 he edited and published Letters of John Cowper Powys to Louis Wilkinson, which the reviewer Douglas Hewitt described as "largely a libretto for a performance [by] a pair of outrageously shocking old men".

[84] During his writing career Wilkinson received mostly favourable critical comments – words such as "clever", "skilful" and "witty" appear regularly in reviews.

[n 9] He was sometimes chided for the apparent dullness of his themes, and on one occasion for his "galvanic mode of expression",[56] but was generally respected in the literary world, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.