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John Cowper Powys

Author profile

born

October 08, 1872 in The United Kingdom

died

June 17, 1963

gender

male

genre

Literature & Fiction

About this author

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Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar. His mother was descended from the poet William Cowper, hence his middle name. His two younger brothers, Llewelyn Powys and Theodore Francis Powys, also became well-known writers. Other brothers and sisters also became prominent in the arts. John studied at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and became a teacher and lecturer; as lecturer, he worked first in England, then in continental Europe and finally in the USA, where he lived in the years 1904-1934. While in the United States, his work was championed by author Theodore Dreiser. He engaged in public debate with Bertrand Russell and the philosopher and historian Will Durant: he was called for the defen...more

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Books by John Cowper Powys

Average rating: 3.98 · 490 ratings · 66 reviews · 68 distinct works

	Wolf Solent 3.96 avg rating — 120 ratings — published 1929 — 10 editions	My rating:
	A Glastonbury Romance 4.18 avg rating — 92 ratings — published 1932 — 10 editions	My rating:
	Porius 4.19 avg rating — 43 ratings — published 1951 — 5 editions	My rating:
	Weymouth Sands 4.16 avg rating — 37 ratings — published 1934 — 10 editions	My rating:
	Owen Glendower 3.80 avg rating — 25 ratings — published 1940 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Maiden Castle 4.00 avg rating — 25 ratings — published 1936 — 5 editions	My rating:
	Autobiography 4.19 avg rating — 21 ratings — published 1934 — 2 editions	My rating:
	The Meaning of Culture 4.00 avg rating — 9 ratings — published 1929 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Ducdame 3.67 avg rating — 9 ratings — published 1925	My rating:
	In Defence Of Sensuality 4.12 avg rating — 8 ratings — published 1930	My rating:

More books by John Cowper Powys…

Quotes by John Cowper Powys

“It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.”
― John Cowper Powys

5 people liked it

“There occurred within a causal radius of Brandon Station one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause. In the soul of the great blazing sun there were complicated superhuman vibrations [connected] ... with the feelings of a few intellectual sages who had enough imagination to recognise the conscious personality of this fiery orb as it flung far and wide its life-giving magnetic forces. Roaring, cresting, heaving, gathering, mounting, advancing, receding, the enormous fire-thoughts of this huge luminary surged relentlessly to and fro, evoking a turbulent aura of psychic activity. ”
― John Cowper Powys

tags: ecstatic , mystical , pretentious

1 person liked it

“though books, as Milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical, and wicked spirits! in books dwell all the demons and all the angels of the human mind. it is for this reason that a a bookshop -- especially a second-hand bookshop / antiquarian - is an arsenal of explosives, an armory of revolutions, an opium den of reaction.

and just because books are the repository of all the redemptions and damnations, all the sanities and insanities, of the divine anarchy of the soul, they are still, as they have alwasys been, an object of suspicion to every kind of ruling authority. in a second-hand bookshop are the horns of the altar where all the outlawed thoughts of humanity can take refuge! here, like depserate bandits, hide all the reckless progeny of our wild, dark, self-lacerating hearts. a bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.

of all the 'houses of ill fame' which a tyrant, a bureaucrat, a propagandist, a moralist, a champion of law and order, an advocate of keeping people ignorant for their own good, hurries past with averted eyes or threatens with this minions, a bookshop is the most flagrant.

~ autobiography”
― John Cowper Powys