Although Charles Landbridge Morgan is between known as a novelist than as an essayist, having written eleven novels between the early 1920s and the late 1950s, most critics agree that his real talent lay in the essay form, for even in his novels he shows a predisposition for writing long and generalized philosophical arguments. Moreover, he was well known during World War II for his weekly series in the Times Literary Supplement entitled "Menander's Mirror"--short reflective essays that were welcome primarily for their leisurely and meditative prose, reminiscent of an older and more sedate era. As critic Albert Guerard said of Morgan's first essay collection, Reflections in a Mirror (1944), "The charm of [the] essays is their timely timelessness. London was blitzed and robot-bombed: but 'Menander' kept writing of 'Why Birds Sing,' of Ivan Turgenev, of 'Nausicaa and the Pelicans'" (Nation, September 1945).

Born on 22 January 1894, in Bromley...