William Gerhardie

Who was William Gerhardie?

William Alexander Gerhardie was a British novelist and playwright.

Gerhardie was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s. H.G. Wells also championed his work. His first novel, Futility, was written while he was at Worcester College, Oxford and drew on his experiences in Russia fighting the Bolsheviks, along with his childhood experiences visiting pre-revolutionary Russia. Some say that it was the first work in English to fully explore the theme of 'waiting' later made famous by Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot, but it is probably more apt to recognize a common comic nihilism between those two figures. His next novel, The Polyglots, is probably his masterpiece. Again it deals with Russia.

He collaborated with Hugh Kingsmill on the biography The Casanova Fable, his friendship with Kingsmill being both a source of conflict over women and a great intellectual stimulus.