Olaf Stapledon (Utopianism and Communitarianism)

William Olaf Stapledon is best remembered for the extraordinary works of speculative fiction he published between 1930 and 1950. As a novelist, he was known as the spokesman for the Age of Einstein and has influenced writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Arthur C. Clarke, and Doris Lessing. Robert Crossley’s biography, the first to draw on a vast body of unpublished and private documents, reveals fully the internal struggles that shaped Stapledon’s life and reclaims for public attention a distinctive voice of the modern era. Using information from a wide variety of primary sources—interviews, correspondence, papers in private hands, and archival documents—this biography will likely become the basic word on Stapledon’s life for the twenty-first century.