Up for auction "L. A. G. Strong" Leonard Strong Hand Written Letter Dated 1950. This item is authenticated By Todd
Mueller Autographs and comes with their certificate of authenticity.
ES-8163E
Leonard
Alfred George Strong (8
March 1896 – 17 August 1958) was a popular English novelist, critic, historian,
and poet, and published under the name L. A. G. Strong. He served
as a director of the publishers Methuen Ltd. from
1938 to 1958. Strong was born at Compton Gifford, of Irish parents, and was proud of his Irish
heritage. As a youth, he considered being a comedian and
took lessons in singing. He was educated at Brighton College and earned a
scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, as what was known as an Open Classical
Scholar (studies in literature and the arts).[3] There he came
under the influence of W. B. Yeats, about whom
Strong wrote fairly extensively; they met first in autumn 1919. Their
friendship lasted for twenty years. He taught at an Oxford preparatory school,
before becoming a full-time writer in 1930. His first two volumes of poetry
were Dublin Days (1921) and The Lowery Road (1923),
and his career as a novelist was launched with Dewer Rides (1929,
set on Dartmoor). Later he formed a literary partnership with an Irish friend,
John Francis Swaine (1880-1954), paying Swaine a percentage of royalties for
five novels and numerous short stories, published between c.1930 and 1953,
which were attributed to Strong. These included the Sea Wall (1933), The
Bay (1944), and Trevannion (1948). Swaine's short
stories described the thoughts and experiences of an Irish character, Mr
Mangan, a fictional version of Swaine himself. Strong wrote many works of non‐fiction and an autobiography of his early
years, Green Memory (1961). He gained a wide
interest in literature and wrote about many important contemporary authors,
including James Joyce, William Faulkner, John Millington Synge,
and John Masefield. He worked
as an Assistant Master at Summer Fields, a boys' boarding preparatory
school on the outskirts of Oxford, from 1917 to 1919 and from
1920 to 1930, and as a Visiting Tutor at the Central School of Speech
and Drama. One of his pupils was a son of Reginald McKenna. He was a director of the
publishers Methuen Ltd. from 1938 until his death. For many
years he was a governor of his old school, Brighton College. Strong's
autobiography, Green Memory, published after his death, described
his family (including a grandmother in Ireland), his earliest years, his
school-days, and his friendships at Wadham College; among them were Yeats
and George Moore.Following his
death in Guildford, Surrey, a memorial service was held for him at St. Martin-in-the-Fields,
London, on 3 October 1958.[5 Strong was a versatile and prolific
writer of more than 20 novels, as well as of short stories, plays, children's
books, poems, biography, criticism, and film scripts. His oeuvre includes
mystery novels, featuring Detective-Inspector McKay of Scotland Yard, and horror fiction. Many of his adventure and romance novels were
set in Scotland or the West of England. The classic short story
"Breakdown", a tale about a married man who has the perfect
plan to murder his mistress, and which has a twist ending, has been reprinted often; it was a favorite
of Boris Karloff. (Unhappy marriages were an occasional theme in
his fiction, in works such as Deliverance.) His supernatural
stories were often reprinted, as well. Strong was interested in the paranormal,
as his haunted house and
other horror stories attest, and believed he had seen ghosts and witnessed
psychic phenomena. One
of his earliest writings, A Defence of Ignorance, was the first
book sold by Captain Louis Henry Cohn, the founder of House of Books, which
specialized in first editions of
contemporary writers. Cohn was a New York book collector who of necessity
became a bookseller due to the Wall Street Crash of 1929,
and he had Strong's manuscript, a six-page essay, in his collection. Cohn
published 200 signed copies of the title, priced at $2.00 each. Some
of Strong's poems were set to music by Arthur Bliss. His Selected Poems appeared in
1931 (first American edition in 1932), and The Body's Imperfection:
Collected Poems in 1957. He also edited anthologies of poetry,
sometimes in collaboration with Cecil Day-Lewis. His 1932 novel The Brothers was
filmed in 1947 by the Scottish director David MacDonald; it
starred Patricia Roc. One reviewer
commented, "In a break from tradition, the film substitutes the novel's
unhappy ending with an even unhappier one." Strong collaborated on or
contributed to such filmscripts as Haunted Honeymoon (1940;
a Dorothy L. Sayers story
about Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane), Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (1948),
and Happy Ever After (1954).