Mervyn Peake's Vast Alchemies - The Illustrated, Authorised Biography (Paperback, 2nd Revised edition)

This book is the result of twenty-five years of research into Peake's life and work. It follows Peake, the son of missionary parents, from China to art school in London and his time in an artists' colony in the Channel Islands. It covers in detail his experiences in the army during the Second World War - an unhappy period during which he wrote Titus Groan and the huge influence that his visit to the newly liberated concentration camp at Belsen had on his work. The next ten years of his life were without doubt his most productive but by the mid-1950s he was beginning to show signs of the degenerative illness that eventually killed him in 1968. Previously published in hardback in 1999, this radically revised edition examines the novels, poems, illustrations, and plays and discusses how Peake's life and experiences were channeled through his unique imagination into his work.