Jack Lindsay

Jack Lindsay
Born (1900-10-20)October 20, 1900
Melbourne, Australia
Died March 8, 1990(1990-03-08) (aged 89)
Cambridge, United Kingdom
Occupation Writer, poet, biographer, translator, essayist, editor
Language English
Genre Novels, plays, short stories, non-fiction
Literary movement Realism
Notable awards Order of the Badge of Honour (USSR, 1967)[1]

Jack Lindsay (20 October 1900 – 8 March 1990) was an Australian-born writer, who from 1926 lived in the United Kingdom, initially in Essex. He was born in Melbourne, but spent his formative years in Brisbane. He was the eldest son of Norman Lindsay and brother of author Philip Lindsay.

Early life

He was educated at Brisbane Grammar School and the University of Queensland, from which he graduated with first class honours in Greek and Latin. In the 1920s he contributed stories and poems to a popular weekly magazine, The Bulletin, as well as editing the literary magazines Vision (with his father Norman Lindsay) and London Aphrodite.

Lindsay founded, with P. R. Stephensen and John Kirtley, the Fanfrolico Press for fine publishing, initially in North Sydney. Jack Lindsay left Australia in 1926, never to return. When the University of Queensland Press tried to persuade him to come to Australia for the launch of The Blood Vote in 1985, he declined.

In the UK

In the 1930s the Fanfrolico Press ceased as a business. Lindsay moved to the left politically, writing for Left Review and joining the Communist Party of Great Britain at the end of the decade, becoming an activist. He started writing novels while living in Cornwall. Lindsay's earliest novels were set in Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire; they included Cressida's First Lover (1931), Rome For Sale and Caesar Is Dead (both 1934).[2] Lindsay's historical fiction also includes 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938), a novel about the trial of King Charles I. Lindsay wrote 1649 as an anti-fascist novel.[3] He collaborated, amongst others, with Edgell Rickword.

During World War II, he served in the British Army initially in the Royal Signal Corps. From 1943 he worked for the War Office on theatrical scripts. After the war he lived in Castle Hedingham. Being a prolific writer, he published 169 books including 38 novels and 25 volumes of translations (from Latin, Greek, Russian, and Polish), as well as art, literary, classical, historical and political studies, biographies and autobiographies written from a Marxist perspective.[4]

Works

Fanfrolico Press books, as translator, author or editor

To 1929

1930–1939

1940–1949

1950–1959

1960–1969

1970–1979

1980–1991

New Lyrical Ballads (1945)

Edited by Lindsay, Honor Arundel and Maurice Carpenter. Poets included were:

Dai Alexander – Honor Arundel – John Atkins – Maurice Carpenter – Herbert Corby – Leslie Daiken – Idris Davies – Tom Farnol – Alun Lewis – Jack Lindsay – John Manifold – Geoffrey Matthews – David Martin – Frances Mayo – Hubert Nicholson – Harold W. Owen – Paul Potts – John Pudney – Arnold Rattenbury – M. Richardson – Joyce Rowe – Francis Scarfe – John Singe – Randall Swingler – Mike Whittock

See also

References

  1. ↑ Lindsay, Jack. An article from The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, Vol. 14 (1973)
  2. ↑ Michael Cox and Jack Adrian, The Oxford Book of Historical Stories. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 9780192142191 (p.429).
  3. ↑ "...the record of anti-Fascist historical novels is...surprisingly long and distinguished. It includes....Jack Lindsay's 1649 (1938)"..." Janet Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History. London: Routledge, 1996. ISBN 0415068924 (p. 142).
  4. ↑ The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English. Edited by Jenny Stringer. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, reprinted 2004. ISBN 0-19-212271-1 (p. 393)
  5. ↑ National Library of Australia
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