E. V. Lucas

Edward Verrall Lucas (11 June/12 June 1868 – 26 June 1938) was a versatile and popular English writer. His nearly 100 books demonstrate great facility with style, and are generally acknowledged as humorous by contemporary readers and critics. Some of his essays about the sport cricket are still considered among the best instructional material. He is remembered best for his essays and books about London and travel abroad; these books continue through many editions. He is particularly noted for his biography of Charles Lamb. He was a close friend of Edwin Lutyens.

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Life

He was born in Eltham, Kent into a Quaker family, and educated at Friends School in Saffron Walden. He worked first in a Brighton bookshop and then on a Sussex newspaper followed by The Globe; rising without university education to the Punch magazine 'table' in 1904. He became a prolific writer, providing extensive content for Punch and a column "A wanderer's notebook" for the Sunday Times.

He was responsible for A. A. Milne teaming up with E. H. Shepard for the Winnie-the-Pooh books. He wrote under pen names EVL, VVV, E. D. Ward, and FF for film criticism. Some of his early work was in collaboration with Charles Larcom Graves (1856–1944), another Punch writer.

Rupert Hart-Davis collected and published a collection of his essays on cricket, Cricket All His Life, which John Arlott called "the best written of all books on cricket.[1]

From 1924 he was chairman of the London publishers Methuen and Co.. According to R. G. G. Price's A History of Punch, his polished and gentlemanly essayist's persona concealed:

a cynical clubman … very bitter about men and politics … [with] the finest pornographic library in London.

Media

Works

References

  1. ^ Arlott on Cricket, edited by David Rayvern Allen, Fontana/Collins, 1985, p188.

External links