Claude Houghton

Claude Houghton Oldfield (May 1889 – 10 February 1961), who published under the name Claude Houghton, was a British writer, principally of novels that have been characterised as "psychological romances, often embodying personal mysticism and a remote allegory".

Claude Houghton Oldfield was born in 1889 in Sevenoaks, Kent, the son of George Sargent Oldfield and his wife Elizabeth Harriett née Thomas. After being schooled at Dulwich College, he trained as an accountant. During the First World War, he was rejected for combat service because of poor eyesight and served instead in the Admiralty. He married an actress, Dulcie Benson, in 1920, and the couple moved to a cottage in the Chilterns. He died in 1961 in Eastbourne, East Sussex.

Houghton's literary career began in the 1910s, with the publication of some of his poems in G. K. Chesterton's magazine The New Witness. He would later cite Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, and William Blake as influences on his writing. Several of his novels contain fantastic elements, including the afterlife fantasy Julian Grant Loses His Way and the borderline science-fictional This Was Ivor Trent, about an author who has a vision of a future human being. Houghton stated that all his fiction was based on the belief that modern civilization would collapse "because it no longer believes it has a destiny".

Though he never achieved great popularity with the general public, Houghton's work was praised by such fellow writers as J. B. Priestley,Hugh Walpole, Clemence Dane, and Henry Miller. In 1935, Walpole wrote:

I believe Claude Houghton to be one of the most interesting and one of the most important novelists now writing in England. With none of his contemporaries can one compare him—his odd mixtures of reality and fantasy, his gifts of drama and philosophy, his unusual and significant and courageous themes, his natural aptitude for narrative, this last one of the rarest of gifts among novelists today.

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