Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

Rolfe Arnold Scott-James (1878-1959) was a notable British journalist, editor and literary critic in early twentieth-century literature. He is often cited as one of the first people to use the word "modernism" in his 1908 book Modernism and Romance, in which he writes, "there are characteristics of modern life in general which can only be summed up, as Mr. Thomas Hardy and others have summed them up, by the word, modernism" (p. ix).

Scott-James was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, and graduated in 1901. The Dictionary of National Biography states that Scott-James "possessed a strongly developed social conscience: this manifested itself at many different points in his career in activities which, if distinct from his literary gifts, at the same time enriched them" (872). In 1914, Scott-James, then a close friend of Wyndham Lewis, became the editor of the New Weekly, which did not survive the outbreak of war later that year. During the war, Scott-James enlisted in the Royal Garrison Artillery and fought in France, and by the end of the war he had risen to the rank of Captain and in 1918 was awarded the Military Cross.

In 1934, Scott-James took over the editorship of the influential magazine, the London Mercury from J. C. Squire, in which he published many canonically recognized authors of modernism. The last issue of the London Mercury in April 1939 contained W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats."

His daughter Anne Scott-James also became a prominent journalist. The military historian Max Hastings is his grandson.

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