John Lehmann

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John Frederick Lehmann (born Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, June 2, 1907; died London, April 7, 1987) was an English poet and man of letters, and one of the foremost literary editors of the twentieth century, founding the periodicals New Writing and The London Magazine.

The son of journalist Rudolph Lehmann, and brother of actress Beatrix Lehmann and novelist Rosamond Lehmann, he was educated at Eton and read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, his time at both of which he considered "lost years". After a spell as a journalist in Vienna, he returned to England to found the popular periodical in book format, New Writing (1936-1941) which proved of great influence on literature of the period, and an outlet for writers such as Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden.

After joining Leonard and Virginia Woolf as managing director of Hogarth Press between 1938 and 1946 he created his own firm John Lehmann Ltd with his sister Rosamond, publishing new works by authors such as Sartre and Stendhal, and discovering talents like Thom Gunn and Laurie Lee.

In 1954 he founded The London Magazine, remaining as editor until 1961, following which he was a frequent lecturer, and completed his three volume autobiography, Whispering Gallery (1955), I Am My Brother (1960), The Ample Proposition (1966). In The Purely Pagan Sense (1976) is an autobiographical record of his homosexual lovelife in England and pre-war Germany, discreetly written in the form of a novel. He also wrote the biographies Edith Sitwell (1952), Virginia Woolf and Her World (1975), Thrown To The Woolfs (1978) and Rupert Brooke (1980).