Rex Warner

Rex Warner (9 March 1905 – 24 June 1986) was an English classicist, writer and translator. He is now probably best remembered for The Aerodrome (1941). Warner was described by V. S. Pritchett as "the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade of ideas produced".

He was born Reginald Ernest Warner in Birmingham, England and brought up mainly in Gloucestershire, where his father was a clergyman. He was educated at St. George's School in Harpenden, and at Wadham College, Oxford, where he associated with W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Stephen Spender, and published in Oxford Poetry. He obtained a 1st in Classical Moderations in 1925 and later graduated with a 3rd in English in 1928. He then spent time teaching, some of it in Egypt.

Warner's debut story, "Holiday", appeared in the New Statesman in 1930. His first collection, Poems, appeared in 1937. His poem, "Arms in Spain", a satire on German and Italian support for the Spanish Nationalists, has often been reprinted. He was also a contributor to Left Review. Warner was a great admirer of Franz Kafka and his fiction was "profoundly influenced" by Kafka's work. Warner's first three novels all reflect his anti-fascist beliefs; The Wild Goose Chase is in part a dystopian fantasy about the overthrow of a tyrannical government in a heroic revolution. His second novel, The Professor, published around the time of the Nazi Anschluss, is the story of a liberal academic whose compromises with a repressive government lead eventually to his arrest, imprisonment and murder "while attempting to escape". Contemporary reviewers saw parallels with the Austrian leaders Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg. Although Warner was initially sympathetic to the Soviet Union, "the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact left him disillusioned with Communism".The Aerodrome is an allegorical novel whose young hero is faced with the disintegration of his certainties about his loved ones, and with a choice between the earthy, animalistic life of his home village and the pure, efficient, emotionally detached life of an airman.The Times described The Aerodrome as Warner's "most perfectly accomplished novel".Why Was I Killed? (1943) is an afterlife fantasy with an anti-war theme.

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