Description
Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) was a prolific and astonishingly original writer and artist, who touched at one time or another on almost every literary form. “Peakes Progress” is a selection, compiled by his widow, Maeve Gilmore, from every period of his work as a writer and draughtsman. It contains a remarkable work from childhood. The White Chief of the Umzimbooboo Kaffirs, the early Mr. Slaughterboard, which foreshadows the Titus books, two plays, the Wit to Woo and Noah’s Ark, a broadcast version of Mr. Pye, and a generous selection of Peake’s short stories, poems and nonsense verses as well as his drawings. Including a new preface written by Mervyn Peake’s son, Sebastian, this edition of Peake’s Progress was published to coincide with the centenary of Peake’s birth.
Praise for Mervyn Peake:
A gorgeous, volcanic eruption . . . a work of extraordinary imagination. –“The New Yorker
Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It is a very, very great work . . . a classic of our age. Robertson Davies, author of The Deptford Trilogy
[Peake’s books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience. C.S. Lewis
Peake’s style is marvelous… His inventiveness, his ingenuity, and his humor are astonishing. San Francisco Chronicle
Many readers admire Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but fans of Mervyn Peake’s Titus trilogy maintain that this extravagant epic about a labyrinthine castle populated with conniving Dickensian grotesques is the true fantasy classic of our time The Washington Post Book World