Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys - Softcover

The first major biography of the lost genius of English letters who chose to live in America

John Cowper Powys’s works have been described as “the only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared to the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky...with an immensity to which only Blake could provide a parallel in English literature” (George Steiner, The New Yorker).

In this, Powys’s first comprehensive biography, eminent scholar Morine Krissdóttir delves into the life of the writer, from his childhood in Derbyshire and his celebrated lecture tours through England and the U.S. to his life’s loves and his relationship with his own writing. Krissdóttir demonstrates that Powys—known as much for his essays, letters, poetry, and philosophy as he was his fiction—was a man whose writing had a scope matched only by the breadth his life.

Using primary sources, never-before-seen archival materials (including photos), and Powys’s own writings, Krissdóttir pieces together his life in such a way that this writer—this astonishing talent—will be impossible to forget.