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.

External links

• Mervyn Peake, the official site
• Peake Studies
• The Scriptorium: Mervyn Peake
• "An Excellence of Peake", by Michael Moorcock
• "A Reverie of Bone", a Peake appreciation by Langdon Jones, who edited some of his work
• Gormenghast Castle
• Mervyn Peake, an introduction to his prose works