John Rodker

John Rodker (18 December 1894 – 6 October 1955) was a British writer, modernist poet, and publisher of modernist writers.

John Rodker was born on 18 December 1894 in Manchester, into a Jewish immigrant family. The family moved to London while he was still young.

As a young man he was one of the so-called "Whitechapel Boys", a group including Isaac Rosenberg, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Samuel Weinstein and Joseph Lefkowitz (who coined the name in hindsight). From about 1911, when Rosenberg arrived, they began to aspire to literary careers; and in the years before 1914 Rodker was a published essayist and poet, in The New Age of A. R. Orage and elsewhere. Other "Whitechapel Boys" were the painters David Bomberg and Mark Gertler; they all met together at or near the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

During World War I Rodker was a conscientious objector. He went on the run, sheltering with the poet R. C. Trevelyan, before being arrested in April 1917, imprisoned, and then transferred to the Home Office Work Centre, Princetown, in the former Dartmoor Prison.

In 1919 Rodker started the Ovid Press, a small press which lasted about a year. It published T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (the first edition of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) and portfolios of drawings by Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Edward Wadsworth. That year Rodker took over from Pound as foreign editor of the New York magazine, The Little Review.