John Cowper Powys: 14 books

Wood and Stone was John Cowper Powys' first novel published in 1915. It is no prentice-work however - the author was already in his forties. The novel is set in the area of south Somerset that John Cowper Powys grew up in. The village of Nevilton is based on Montacute where his father was vicar for...

'I have tried to write my life as if I were confessing to a priest, a philosopher, and a wise old woman. I have tried to write as if I were going to be executed when it was finished. I have tried to write it as if I were both God and Devil.' One is tempted to say only John Cowper Powys could have...

In this panoramic novel of Friar Roger Bacon, John Cowper Powys displays his genius at its most fecund. First published in 1956, this novel, set in thirteenth-century Wessex, is an amalgam of all the qualities that make John Cowper Powys unique. The love-story of Lil-Umbra and Raymond de Laon,...

After My Fashion has an unusual publishing history. Although it was John Cowper Powys' third novel and written in 1920, it wasn't published until 1980. It seems that when his US publisher turned it down Powys made no effort to place it elsewhere. Indeed, when Powys had finished a book he tended to...

Published in 1954, John Cowper Powys called this novel, a 'long romance about Odysseus in his extreme old age, hoisting sail once more from Ithaca'. As usual there is a large cast of human characters but Powys also gives life and speech to inanimates such as a stone pillar, a wooden club,and...

Rodmoor is, unusually for a John Cowper Powys novel, set in East Anglia, Rodmoor itself being a coastal village.The protagonist, Adrian Sorio, is a typically Powys-like hero, highly-strung with only precarious mental stability. He is in love with two women - Nance Herrick and the more unconventional...

'It is not our struggle to be happy that is mistaken; it is our false idea that we can find happiness anywhere but in ourselves... happiness does not depend on outward things. It is born of the mind, it is nourished by the mind, it is what rises, like breath in a frosty air, from the mind's wrestling...

A self-analyzing piece of literature, this volume demonstrates a critic turning his sharp eye inward. John Cowper wrote his section because he “is always engaged in analyzing the minds of clever artists; let [him] for once, undertake the less pleasing task of analyzing the mind of a clever critic.”...

Ducdame was John Cowper Powys' fourth novel published in 1925. It is set in Dorset. The protagonist, Rook Ashover (a wonderfully Powysian name) is an introverted young squire with a dilemma: to go on loving his mistress, Netta Page, or, make a respectable marriage and produce an heir.Of his...

«La prima fase potremmo chiamarla fede emotiva. La seconda potremmo chiamarla fede metafisica. La terza, disillusione assoluta. La quarta, comprensione estetica». Difficile immaginare che queste parole siano state pronunciate nel 1924 sul piccolo palco di un albergo newyorkese, dove ad assistere...

This 1916 roughly chronological appraisal begins with the Psalms of David and ends with The Oxford Book of English Verse. Powys lists and comments on canonical favorites by Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Austen, as well as works by lesser-known authors such as Walter Pater, Gilbert Cannan, Vincent O’Sullivan, and Oliver Onions.

This 1914 book was written for an American readership in response to a polemic by Professor Münsterberg defending the German view of the war. Here, Powys contrasts the idea of the "omnipotent and irresistible State-machine" of the Germans to the Allies' aim of protecting "the individual against the State." 

This 1915 collection of literary essays reflects the author's conviction that such essays should ideally convey to readers the impact of an author or work of fiction upon the critic: no more and no less.  The artists covered include Rabelais, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Nietzsche, Hardy, Poe, and Whitman, among other greats.