Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Laurence Peake (July 9, 1911 - November 17, 1968) was a British modernist writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books, though the Titus books would be more accurate: the four works that exist were the beginning of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, following his protagonist Titus Groan from cradle to grave, but Peake's untimely death interrupted the cycle at what is now commonly but erroneously called a trilogy. They are sometimes compared to the work of his contemporary J.R.R. Tolkien, but his surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.

Bibliography

• Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939)
• Shapes and Sounds (1941)
• Rhymes without Reason (1944)
• Titus Groan (1946)
• The Craft of the Lead Pencil (1946)
• Letters from a Lost Uncle (from Polar Regions) (1948)
• Drawings by Mervyn Peake (1949)
• Gormenghast (1950)
• The Glassblowers (1950)
• Mr Pye (1953)
• Figures of Speech (1954)
• Titus Alone (1959)
• The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1962)
• Poems and Drawings (1965)
• A Reverie of Bone and other Poems (1967)
• Selected Poems (1972)
• A Book of Nonsense (1972)
• The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (1974)
• Mervyn Peake: Writings and Drawings (1974)
• Twelve Poems (1975)
• Boy in Darkness (first separate edition, 1976)
• Peake's Progress (1978)
• Ten Poems (1993)
• Eleven Poems (1995)
• The Cave (1996)