John Lucas

Biography

John Welles Lucas, who later became known simply as Saint John Lucas, was born in 1879 born in Rugby, Warwickshire, England. Little information is available regarding his parentage or early childhood. However, biographical sources do show that Lucas graduated from University College of Oxford in 1905, after which he began his career as a poet and author.

While writing short stories and vignettes for both Blackwood’s Magazine and Open Window, Lucas also developed his reputation through his work in writing anthologies of poetry. He is credited for compiling multiple Oxford Anthologies of both French and Italian verse, published by Clarendon Press from 1907-1910. A selection of his most famous short stories, titled Saints, Sinners, and the Usual People, was also published in book form by William Blackwood and Sons in 1911. This collection included titles such as “Three Grotesques” and “The Iconoclast.” One review by a London Newspaper, The Spectator describes Lucas as possessing an “enviable…decorative, fanciful and urbane” style, despite being overly reminiscent of the “long-breathed romance” of his literary predecessors.

In addition to building up his own modest reputation as a poet and short story writer, Lucas also developed a close relationship with the famous war poet Rupert Brooke, who was eight years younger than Lucas. Their friendship began in 1905 when Brooke was still at Rugby and was just starting to receive recognition for his poem “The Pyramids.” Lucas acted as something of a mentor to Brooke—Brooke would often send Lucas his poems to review, while Lucas would recommend various poems and reading for his young friend. In one letter, Brooke asked Lucas to send works by “the three great decadent writers” (referring to Oscar Wilde, St John Lucas, and Rupert Brooke).

Within the full oeuvre of modernist short fiction, the fiction of Saint-John Lucas is quite unique. Working simultaneously as a scholar of Romantic French and Italian verse and as a fiction writer in the dawn of the Modernist era, Lucas expressed modernist themes and ideas through a distinctly Romantic literary style.