D. B. Wyndham Lewis

Dominic Bevan Wyndham Lewis (1894-1969) was born in Wales and educated at Oxford. Prior to serving in World War I, he intended to pursue the legal profession; but after, having suffered two bouts of shell shock and one of malaria, he set his sights on journalism. In 1919, he became a columnist for The London Daily Express under the pseudonym “Beach Comber.” These pieces and those that he later wrote for The London Daily Mail and The London News Chronicle capture Lewis’s legendary wit and savage, though eloquent, impatience with modern trends and are collected in the volumes At the Green Goose (1923), At the Sign of the Blue Moon (1924), At the Blue Moon Again (1925), and On Straw and Other Conceits (1929). He wrote several literary biographies, acclaimed for both their spirited subjectivity and their attention to historical detail, taking on subjects ranging from Rabelais and Molière to Boswell and Habsburg Emperor Charles V. Mid-career, he also coauthored the story on which Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much was based.
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