John Davy Hayward

John Davy Hayward CBE (2 February 1905 – 17 September 1965) was an English editor, critic, anthologist and bibliophile.

Early life Hayward was educated at Gresham's School and in France before going up to King's College, Cambridge in 1923 to read English and modern languages. While still a Cambridge undergraduate, he edited and published the Collected Works of the Earl of Rochester.

Career From 1927, Hayward lived in London, working as an editor, critic, anthologist and bibliographer. He edited many of Jonathan Swift's works.

In 1929, he edited John Donne, Dean of St Paul's: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose for the Nonesuch Press.

For eleven years, from 1946 to 1957, he shared a house with his close friend the poet T. S. Eliot, gathering and archiving Eliot's papers and styling himself Keeper of the Eliot Archive. Eliot's book of verse called Poems Written in Early Youth was compiled and edited by Hayward. With Eliot's help he emended the poems from The Harvard Advocate and added the poems from Eliot's days at St. Louis' Smith Academy, plus the previously unpublished "The Death of Saint Narcissus". This friendship was strained by Eliot's unexpected marriage in January 1957 to his secretary Esmé Valerie Fletcher. To a large extent, she took over Hayward's functions in Eliot's life after they separated their households.

He was editor of The Book Collector from 1952 to 1965.

Since the mid-1920s Hayward had suffered from muscular dystrophy, and he died in 1965, a few months after Eliot. He bequeathed his entire collection of the literary manuscripts of T.S. Eliot to King's College, Cambridge.