Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle.

Spender was acquainted with fellow Auden Group members Louis MacNeice, Edward Upward and Cecil Day-Lewis.

He was friendly with David Jones and later came to know William Butler Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley, F. T. Prince and T. S. Eliot, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, particularly Virginia Woolf.

Spender wrote in his 1988 introduction: In the late Twenties young English writers were more concerned with censorship than with politics.... 1929 was the last year of that strange Indian Summer—the Weimar Republic.

At the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, which published the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, historic figures made rare appearances to read their work: Paul Valéry, André Gide and Eliot.

In late 1936, Spender married Inez Pearn, whom he had recently met at an Aid to Spain meeting.

A secondary (or possibly the primary) reason for his trip was an initially unsuccessful attempt to rescue his jilted lover, the "former Welsh Guardsman turned occasional prostitute" Tony Hyndman, who had left for Spain two days after Spender's marriage to join the International Brigade.

In Madrid, he met Malraux; they discussed Gide's Retour de l'U.R.S.S.. Because of medical problems, he went back to England and bought a house in Lavenham.

Spender's 1938 translations of works by Bertolt Brecht and Miguel Hernández appeared in John Lehmann's New Writing.

[14] Spender felt close to the Jewish people; his mother, Violet Hilda Schuster, was half-Jewish (her father's family were German Jews who converted to Christianity, and her mother came from an upper-class family of Catholic German, Lutheran Danish and distant Italian descent).

[citation needed] After leaving the Communist Party, Spender wrote of his disillusionment with communism in the essay collection The God that Failed (1949), along with Arthur Koestler and others.

Like Auden, Isherwood and several other outspoken opponents of fascism in the 1930s, Spender did not see active military service in World War II.

He was initially graded C upon examination because of his earlier colitis, poor eyesight, varicose veins and the long-term effects of a tapeworm in 1934.

[17] With Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson, Spender co-founded Horizon magazine and served as its editor from 1939 to 1941.

He was the editor of Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1966 but resigned after it emerged that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which published it, was covertly funded by the CIA.

[23] During the late 1960s, Spender frequently visited the University of Connecticut, which he declared had the "most congenial teaching faculty" he had encountered in the United States.

You are men who in your 'lives fought for life... and left the vivid air signed with your honor'.Spender also engaged profoundly with the world of art, including intellectual exchanges with Picasso.

The artist Henry Moore did etchings and lithographs to accompany the work of writers, including Charles Baudelaire and Spender.

[28] Spender "collected and befriended artists such as Arp, Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, Giacometti, Gorky, Guston, Hockney, Moore, Morandi, Picasso and others".

[17] In December 1936, shortly after the end of his relationship with Hyndman, Spender fell in love with and married Inez Pearn after an engagement of only three weeks.