John Stewart Collis

John Stewart Collis
Born	1900 Dublin, Ireland
Died	1984
Nationality	Irish, British
Occupation	Biographer, rural writer
Known for	The Worm Forgives the Plough

John Stewart Collis (1900–1984) was a British biographer, rural author, and pioneer of the ecology movement. He is known for his book The Worm Forgives the Plough based on his wartime experience working in the Land Army in the Second World War.

The son of an Irish solicitor, Collis was born at Kilmore on the borders of County Dublin and County Wicklow, Ireland. He was educated at Bray preparatory school,Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford. At the Oxford Union he learnt the art of public speaking, hearing politicians and authors including H. H. Asquith, G. K. Chesterton, Lloyd George and W. B. Yeats in the debating chamber. In the 1920s he became a close friend of the Guernsey-born G.B. Edwards, who lodged at his flat in Guildford Street. Both men became protégés of John Middleton Murry and contributed to The Adelphi magazine but later drifted apart. Collis, however, wrote an enthusiastic review of Edwards's The Book of Ebenezer Le Page in the Spectator when this novel was posthumously published in 1981.

Collis's first book, a biography of George Bernard Shaw, was published in 1925, followed by biographies of Havelock Ellis, August Strindberg, Leo Tolstoy, the Carlyles and Christopher Columbus.

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