John Cowper Powys pursued, through ninety full years and nearly sixty books, the ultimate questions that persons of vision and spirit have always asked as they looked out on the visible world. Is there something behind it? Is this world good, or evil? Or indifferent? Powys's fiction overflows, certainly, with people caught up in the active, worldly drama of their lives, for he is, preeminently, a bard, a storyteller of the old oral traditions. And yet, through the tales of his people, he persistently seeks to know "the whole mysterious essence of human life" and whether the material world holds the entire substance and sum of existence. Powys's quest is for the Grail, but a Grail that is "older than Christianity," he tells us, "older than the worship of the gods.... The Grail has its counterpart in the mythology of Greece and in the oldest heathen legends of...