John Lehmann

Rudolf John Frederick Lehmann (2 June 1907 – 7 April 1987) was an English publisher, poet and man of letters. He founded the periodicals New Writing and The London Magazine, and the publishing house of John Lehmann Limited.

Early life and education Born in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, the fourth child of journalist Rudolph Lehmann, and brother of Helen Lehmann, novelist Rosamond Lehmann and actress Beatrix Lehmann, he was educated at Eton and read English at Trinity College, Cambridge. He considered his time at both as "lost years". At Trinity, Lehmann had a passionate relationship with Virginia Woolf's nephew, Quentin Bell.

Literary magazine founder After a period as a journalist in Vienna, he returned to England to found the popular periodical New Writing (1936–40) in book format. It proved a great influence on literature of the period and an outlet for writers such as Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Edward Upward and miner-author B. L. Coombes. the Holiday Library, the Modern European Library, and the Library of Art and Travel. It operated from 1946–1953.

Autobiographer 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) and The Ample Proposition (1966). In The Purely Pagan Sense (1976) is an autobiographical record of his homosexual life 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), Rupert Brooke (1980) and Christopher Isherwood. A Personal Memoir (1987). His book Three Literary Friendships (1983), deals with the relationships between Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas.

In 1965, he published Christ the Hunter, a spiritual/autobiographical prose poem which had been broadcast in 1964 on the BBC Third Programme. In 1974, Lehmann published a book of poems, The Reader at Night, hand-printed on handmade paper and hand-bound in an edition of 250 signed copies (Toronto, Basilike, 1974). An essay by Paul Davies about the creation of this book is included in Professor A.T. Tolley's collection, John Lehmann: A Tribute (Ottawa; Carleton University Press, 1987), which also includes pieces by Roy Fuller, Thom Gunn, Charles Osborne, Christopher Levenson, Jeremy Reed, George Woodcock, and others.

Personal Life and Death John Lehmann was for many years the partner of the ballet dancer Alexis Rassine. Lehmann died in London on 7 April 1987, aged 79.

Poets featured in Penguin New Writing

W. H. Auden George Barker David Gascoyne Robert Graves Bernard Gutteridge Norman Hampson John Heath-Stubbs Hamish Henderson Pierre Jean Jouve Laurie Lee Alun Lewis C. Day-Lewis Lawrence Little Federico García Lorca David Luke Joseph Macleod Louis MacNeice Ewart Milne Nicholas Moore Norman Nicholson William Plomer Pandelis Prevelakis F. T. Prince Henry Reed Anne Ridler Alan Ross May Sarton George Seferis Jaroslav Seifert Edith Sitwell Stephen Spender Randall Swingler A. S. J. Tessimond Dylan Thomas Dunstan Thompson Terence Tiller Robert Waller Peter Yates