[1] His novels include Tarr (1916–17) and The Human Age trilogy, composed of The Childermass (1928), Monstre Gai (1955) and Malign Fiesta (1955).

In 1912, he was commissioned to produce a decorative mural, a drop curtain, and more designs for The Cave of the Golden Calf, an avant-garde cabaret and nightclub on Heddon Street.

[2][6] From 1913 to 1915, Lewis developed the style of geometric abstraction for which he is best known today, which his friend Ezra Pound dubbed "Vorticism".

Though he was later savagely critical of Bergson, he admitted in a letter to Theodore Weiss (19 April 1949) that he "began by embracing his evolutionary system."

[8] In 1915, the Vorticists held their only U.K. exhibition before the movement broke up, largely as a result of World War I. Lewis himself was posted to the western front and served as a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery.

Much of his time was spent in Forward Observation Posts looking down at apparently deserted German lines, registering targets and calling down fire from batteries massed around the rim of the Ypres Salient.

Between the years 1907–11 Lewis had written what would be his first published novel, Tarr, which was revised and expanded in 1914–15[11] and serialized in the London literary magazine The Egoist from April 1916 until November 1917.

[12] Lewis later documented his experiences and opinions of this period of his life in the autobiographical Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), which covered the time up to 1926.

After the war, Lewis resumed his career as a painter with a major exhibition, Tyros and Portraits, at the Leicester Galleries in 1921.

The second (1922) contained an important statement of Lewis's visual aesthetic: "Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art in our Time".

Time and Western Man (1927) is a cultural and philosophical discussion that includes penetrating critiques of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound that are still read.

[14] In 1930 Lewis published The Apes of God, a biting satirical attack on the London literary scene, including a long chapter caricaturing the Sitwell family.

[15] In 1937 Lewis published The Revenge for Love, set in the period leading up to the Spanish Civil War and regarded by many as his best novel.

After the publication in The Times of a letter of support for the exhibition, asking that something from the show be purchased for the national collection (signed by, among others, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Geoffrey Grigson, Rebecca West, Naomi Mitchison, Henry Moore and Eric Gill) the Tate Gallery bought the painting, Red Scene.

During this period, Lewis also produced many of his most well-known portraits, including pictures of Edith Sitwell (1923–1936), T. S. Eliot (1938 and 1949), and Ezra Pound (1939).

He published several autobiographical and critical works: Rude Assignment (1950), Rotting Hill (1951), a collection of allegorical short stories about his life in "the capital of a dying empire";[18][19] The Writer and the Absolute (1952), a book of essays on writers including George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux; and the semi-autobiographical novel Self Condemned (1954).

[citation needed] Following a second visit to Germany in 1937, Lewis changed his views and began to retract his previous political comments.

He believed it was against Britain's self-interest to ally with the Soviet Union, "which the newspapers most of us read tell us has slaughtered out-of-hand, only a few years ago, millions of its better fed citizens, as well as its whole imperial family.

[17] In America and Cosmic Man (1949), Lewis argued that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had successfully managed to reconcile individual rights with the demands of the state.

[17] In recent years, there has been renewed critical and biographical interest in Lewis and his work, and he is now regarded as a major British artist and writer of the twentieth century.

The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University held an exhibition entitled "The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–18" from 30 September 2010 through 2 January 2011.

[28] The exhibition then travelled to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (29 January – 15 May 2011: "I Vorticisti: Artisti ribellia a Londra e New York, 1914–1918") and then to Tate Britain under the title "The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World" between 14 June and 4 September 2011.

Several readings by Lewis are collected on The Enemy Speaks, an audiobook CD published in 2007 and featuring extracts from "One Way Song" and The Apes of God, as well as radio talks titled "When John Bull Laughs" (1938), "A Crisis of Thought" (1947) and "The Essential Purposes of Art" (1951).

[30]In his essay "Good Bad Books", George Orwell presents Lewis as the exemplary writer who is cerebral without being artistic.

Orwell wrote, "Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into Wyndham Lewis's so-called novels… Yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books right through.

[citation needed] Tarr was revised and republished in 1928, giving a new Jewish character a key role in making sure a duel is fought.

A key feature of these interpretations is that Lewis is held to have kept his conspiracy theories hidden and marginalized[citation needed].