Reed, Douglas
Entry updated 28 October 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1895-1976) UK author, in active service as a fighter pilot in World War One, in South Africa from 1947. He was initially best known for such controversial political/cultural studies as Insanity Fair (1938); the essays on World War Two assembled in All Our Tomorrows (coll 1942) culminate in a vision of Hermann Goering in 1979. In his sf novel, The Next Horizon (1945; vt Yeoman's Progress 1946), an Everyman figure and his family experience the twentieth century up to the end of the War, at which point they decide that Communism and Zionism were destroying white civilization (see Paranoia), and emigrate to South Africa in 1950.
In his later years, Reed became a Holocaust denier and argued, reprehensibly, that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1905; trans 1920 chap) was an authentic portrait of a Jewish "world-conspiracy". His posthumous reputation has been "rescued" by online reviewers who share his opinions. [JC]
Douglas Launcelot Reed
born London: 11 March 1895
died Durban, South Africa: 26 August 1976
works (selected)
- All Our Tomorrows (London: Jonathan Cape, 1942) [nonfiction: coll: hb/]
- The Next Horizon (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945) [hb/nonpictorial]
- Yeoman's Progress (Indianapolis, Indiana: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1946) [vt of the above: hb/]
links
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