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Joad, C E M

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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(1891-1953) UK philosopher, broadcaster and author, a senior civil servant during World War One, and thus exempt from service. His public loucheness and transgressive atheism, as well as a sustained advocacy of free love, are conspicuously manifested in Priscilla and Charybdis and Other Stories (coll 1924), the title story of which features the seduction of a young matron by a hairy flâneur who claims to be the Reincarnation of Pan (see Sex). His last work of fiction, The Adventures of the Young Soldier in Search of the Better World (1943), much augmented by Mervyn Peake's illustrations, fairly closely homages his old mentor George Bernard Shaw's The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), recording the Candide-like explorations of its protagonist, who engages in disquisitions with a series of allegorically-named figures, each describing versions of Utopia; in one of these, set in a clearly Near Future world, minds are controlled centrally by radio; elsewhere, the future of Communism is expounded by a Robot. [JC]

see also: To-day and To-morrow.

Cyril Edwin Mitchison Joad

born Durham, County Durham: 12 August 1891

died London: 9 April 1953

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nonfiction

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