John Lehmann (Rudolph John Frederick Lehmann) Biography

British poet and editor, born at Bourne End in Buckinghamshire, the brother of Rosamond Lehmann, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the Hogarth Press as an assistant in 1931 and became a partner in the venture in 1938. Thrown to the Woolfs (1978) contains his reminiscences of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. In 1936 he established New Writing, which was succeeded by The Penguin New Writing (1940–50). He was founding editor of London Magazine from 1954 to 1961. In these periodicals he published work by almost every poet of note over a period of twenty-five years. His own publications as a poet include A Garden Revisited (1931) and The Sphere of Glass (1944), which collect the work that gained him a high reputation in the 1930s; Collected Poems (1963) was followed by New and Selected Poems (1985). His three volumes of autobiography, The Whispering Gallery (1951), I Am My Brother (1960), and The Ample Proposition (1966), form a valuable account of literary life during the years of his greatest activity. His other works include A Nest of Tigers (1968), his study of the Sitwells, and two novels, Evil Was Abroad (1938) and In the Purely Pagan Sense (1976).