A. R. Orage (Alfred Richard Orage) Biography

British editor and critic, born at Dacre in Yorkshire; he taught in Leeds after training at a college in Culham, Oxford-shire. His interest in the cultural implications of socialism led him to found the Leeds Arts Club with Holbrook Jackson. His early publications include the monograph Friedrich Nietzsche (1905). In 1906 he became a journalist in London and took over the New Age in association with Jackson in 1907. His critical writings for the periodical emphasize the ethical and social functions of literature and contain close textual readings which anticipate the development of analytical criticism in the 1920s. The New Age remained a central forum for literary discourse until around 1920, when Orage became immersed in the teachings of Gurdjieff, whose Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963) he translated. Between 1922 and 1930 he was active as a fund-raiser for the Gurdjieff Institute in Fontainebleau. In 1931 he founded the New English Weekly, the chief organ of the Social Credit movement. His Political and Economic Writings (1935) were edited by Montgomery Butchart. 'The New Age' under Orage (1967) is by Wallace Martin, who edited Orage as Critic (1974), a selection of his critical work.