Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis) CBE (27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972) was an Irish-born poet, as well as Poet Laureate for Britain between 1968 to 1972, and, under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, a mystery writer. He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.
Franklin Library Nicholas Blake books
The Beast Must Die - Library of Mystery Masterpieces - 1990
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Cecil Day-Lewis biography
Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis (December, 1872 – 19 April 1938) and Kathleen Squires. After Day-Lewis's mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. Day-Lewis continued to regard himself as "Anglo-Irish" for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest roots lay. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927.
In 1928 he married Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne master (i.e. teacher), and worked as a schoolmaster in three schools. During the 1940s he had a long and troubled love affair with the novelist Rosamund Lehmann. His second marriage was to actress Jill Balcon.
During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, an institution satirised by George Orwell in his dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, but equally based on Orwell's experience of the BBC.
After the war, he joined publisher Chatto & Windus as a director and senior editor. In 1946, Day-Lewis was a lecturer at Cambridge University, publishing his lectures in The Poetic Image (1947). In 1951, he married the actress Jill Balcon, daughter of Michael Balcon. He later taught poetry at Oxford, where he was Professor of Poetry from 1951-1956. From 1962-1963 Day-Lewis was the Norton Professor at Harvard University.
Day-Lewis's two marriages yielded five children, including Academy Award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, food writer and journalist Tamasin Day-Lewis, and TV critic and writer Sean Day-Lewis, who wrote a biography of his father, C. Day Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980). He also had a son (possibly two) by a farmer's wife in Dorset in the early 1940s: they were brought up as the children of their mother's legal husband.
He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, in succession to John Masefield. Day-Lewis was also chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel, vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London.
Day-Lewis died from pancreatic cancer on May 22, 1972, in the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, where he and his wife were staying. He was a great admirer of Thomas Hardy, and he had arranged to be buried as close as possible to the author's grave in Stinsford churchyard. His epitaph reads: "Shall I be gone long? / For ever and a day / To whom there belong? / Ask the stone to say / Ask my song"
Nicholas Blake
In 1935 Day-Lewis decided to supplement his income from poetry by writing a detective novel, A Question of Proof, in which he created Nigel Strangeways, an amateur investigator, who, as the nephew of an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, has the same access to, and good relations with, official crime investigation bodies as those enjoyed by other fictional sleuths such as Ellery Queen, Philo Vance and Lord Peter Wimsey. This was followed by nineteen more crime novels. (In the first Nigel Strangeways novel, the detective is modeled on W. H. Auden, but Strangeways becomes a far less extravagant and more serious figure in later novels.) From the mid-1930s Day-Lewis was able to earn his living by writing. Four of the Blake novels - A Tangled Web, Penknife In My Heart, The Deadly Joker, The Private Wound - do not feature Strangeways.
Poetry
In Oxford Day-Lewis became part of the circle gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. His first collection of poems, Beechen Vigil, appeared in 1925. During the Second World War his work was now no longer so influenced by Auden and he was developing a more traditional style of lyricism. Some critics believe that he reached his full stature as a poet in Word Over All (1943), when he finally distanced himself from Auden.
He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, in succession to John Masefield.
Nicholas Blake books in order
A Question of Proof (1935)
Thou Shell of Death (1936) (also published as Shell of Death)
There's Trouble Brewing (1937)
The Beast Must Die (1938)
The Smiler With The Knife (1939)
Malice in Wonderland (1940) (US title: The Summer Camp Mystery)
The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941) (also published as The Corpse in the Snowman)
Minute for Murder (1947)
Head of a Traveller (1949)
The Dreadful Hollow (1953)
The Whisper in the Gloom (1954) (also published as Catch and Kill)
A Tangled Web (1956) (also published as Death and Daisy Bland)
End of Chapter (1957)
A Penknife in my Heart (1958)
The Widow's Cruise (1959)
The Worm of Death (1961)
The Deadly Joker (1963)
The Sad Variety (1964)
The Morning After Death (1966)
The Private Wound (1968)
Cecil Day-Lewis books in order
Poetry
Transitional Poem (1929)
From Feathers To Iron (1932)
Collected Poems 1929–1933 (1935)
A Time To Dance And Other Poems (1935)
Overtures to Death (1938)
Short Is the Time (1945)
Collected Poems (1954)
Pegasus and Other Poems (1957)
The Whispering Roots and Other Poems (1970)
Complete Poems (1992)
Essays
A Hope for Poetry (1934)
Translations
Virgil's Georgics (1940)
Virgil's Aeneid (1952)
Eclogues (1963)
Children's novels
Dick Willoughby (1933)
The Otterbury Incident (1948)
Source and additional information: Cecil Day-Lewis