Poet, illustrator, painter, and playwright, as well as novelist, Mervyn Peake's major achievement in prose is his Gormenghast trilogy, one of the most vividly sustained flights of imagination of postwar British fiction.

Born in central China, Mervyn Laurence Peake was the second son of Ernest Cromwell Peake, a London Missionary Society doctor who headed the society's hospital in Tientsin from 1913 to 1923. As soon as Mervyn Peake was old enough to hold a pencil, his gift for drawing became apparent, and his mother, Amanda Elizabeth Powell Peake, kept him well supplied with paper and crayons. His early education was at Tientsin Grammar School, to which he rode on a donkey. His first publications, which he illustrated, were in News from Afar, the London Missionary Society's magazine for children. "A Letter from China" appeared in 1922, and an article, "Ways of Travelling," appeared in 1924 but was written in 1921 when Peake was...