D. B. Wyndham Lewis

Who was D. B. Wyndham Lewis?

Dominic Bevan Wyndham Lewis FRSL was a British writer best known for his humorous contributions to newspapers and for biographies. Born Llewellyn Bevan Wyndham Lewis, he dropped his first name and replaced it with "Dominic" after his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1921. His family were originally from Wales, but he was born in Liverpool and brought up in Cardiff. He served in the Welch Regiment during World War I, and afterwards joined the Daily Express where he was briefly the newspaper's Literary Editor.

In 1919 he was put in charge of the paper's humorous 'By the Way' column and adopted the pen name Beachcomber. However he was not happy confining his contribution to humour, and gave up the column to the better-known J. B. Morton. Morton acknowledged Wyndham-Lewis' contribution by dedicating his first anthology of columns to him. Wyndham-Lewis lived in Paris from the mid-1920s while doing historical research.

In 1928 Wyndham-Lewis wrote a biography of François Villon, which seemed designed to be an entertaining read. Later biographies of French King Louis XI and of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V appeared tinged with Wyndham-Lewis' admitted Francophilia, although it was generally accepted that they were written with a verve rarely found in biographies of this sort of subject. However, perhaps his best-remembered work is as an editor, not as a writer: The Stuffed Owl which he co-edited with Charles Lee. This anthology of 'bad verse' is justly famous as being one of the funniest of all poetry collections, featuring William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Edgar Allan Poe and many others at considerably less than their best.