Read, Herbert
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1893-1968) UK poet, anarchist and prolific critic of art, literature and politics. His only novel, The Green Child: A Romance (1935) was inspired by the twelfth-century legend of the Green Children of Woolpit, two greenish-skinned children who wandered into a British village and claimed to have come from an underground world called "St. Martin's Land" [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The novel is a remarkable double Utopia in which two visions of ideal human life – one a political utopia created by the protagonist in a fictional South American country and the other a mystical, Underground Lost World in which human aspirations are subject to a surpassingly chill Transcendence – mirror one another, comprising together a dramatic critique of and metaphor for the utopian impulse as a whole. Herbert Read was knighted in 1953. [JC/LW]
see also: Little Green Men.
Sir Herbert Edward Read
born Muscoates Grange, near Kirkby Moorside, Yorkshire: 4 December 1893
died Stonegrave House, near Kirkby Moorside, Yorkshire: 12 June 1968
works
- The Green Child: A Romance (London: William Heinemann, 1935) [hb/M E]
links
previous versions of this entry