"Though more than sixty years have passed, I can still visualize the very shelf in the Minehead Public Library where I discovered Olaf Stapldon’s Last and First Men. No other book had a greater influence on my life."—Arthur C. Clarke
Description
William Olaf Stapledon is best remembered for the extraordinary works of speculative fiction he published between 1930 and 1950. As a novelist, he was known as the spokesman for the Age of Einstein and has influenced writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Arthur C. Clarke, and Doris Lessing. Robert Crossley’s biography, the first to draw on a vast body of unpublished and private documents, reveals fully the internal struggles that shaped Stapledon’s life and reclaims for public attention a distinctive voice of the modern era. Using information from a wide variety of primary sources—interviews, correspondence, papers in private hands, and archival documents—this biography will likely become the basic word on Stapledon’s life for the twenty-first century.
About the Author
Robert Crossley, Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is the author of H.G. Wells and editor of Talking Across the World: The Love Letters of Olaf Stapledon and Agnes Miller, 1913-1919. Brian W. Aldiss is the author of numerous works of science fiction and fantasy, including Helliconia Winter and Frankenstein Unbound and a history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree.
July 1994
