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David Lindsay (1876-1945) was a British science fiction novelist. Born in London to a Scottish Calvinist family, he excelled as a student at Colfe’s School in Lewisham before embarking on a career in insurance. At 40 years of age, he joined the Grenadier Guards to fight in the First World War, eventually rising to the rank of Corporal. After the war, he moved to Cornwall with his wife Jacqueline to pursue life as a professional writer. A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), although a commercial flop, would go on to earn praise from both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. His next novel, The Haunted Woman (1922), sold poorly as well, encouraging Lindsay to give up his dream of commercial success in order to produce the stories he wanted to write. Despite this, his ambition flagged by the mid-1930s, no doubt due in part to his strained relationship with Jacqueline and the financial difficulties of managing their boarding house in Brighton. During the Second World War, a German bomb caused considerable damage to their home, the resulting shock from which led to a decline in the author’s physical and mental health. Months before the end of the war, he died from an infection that spread from a severe tooth abscess. In the decades since, scholars and writers alike have praised A Voyage to Arcturus as one of the twentieth century’s finest works of science fiction and fantasy. English novelist and philosopher Colin Wilson dubbed it the “greatest novel of the twentieth century,” while film director Clive Barker has called it “an extraordinary work.”
