Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was an English painter and author (he dropped the name ‘Percy’, which he disliked). He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST. His novels include his pre-World War I-era novel Tarr (set in Paris), and The Human Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass (1928), Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (both 1955), set in the afterworld. A fourth volume of The Human Age, The Trial of Man, was begun by Lewis but left in a fragmentary state at the time of his death. He also wrote two autobiographical volumes, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date (1950).

By 1951, he was completely blind. In 1950 he published the autobiographical Rude Assignment, in 1951 a collection of allegorical short stories about his life (and the life of his friends) in “the capital of a dying empire,” entitled “Rotting Hill,” and in 1952 a book of essays on writers such as George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux, entitled “The Writer and the Absolute.” This was followed by the semi-autobiograpical novel “Self Condemned” (1954), a major late statement.