Sir Stephen Harold Spender (1909-1995), poet, critic, translator, travel writer, and English man of letters, first came to prominence as a poet of social protest in the 1930s.

Stephen Spender was born February 28, 1909, the son of well-to-do, accomplished parents. His father, Edward Harold Spender, was himself a novelist and journalist. Stephen attended the University College School and then matriculated at University College, Oxford, where he became active in both literary and political circles, editing university poetry anthologies and debating current issues while forging his own poetic style.

Spender was of the first generation for whom World War I had ceased to be an important symbolic experience (as it had been for such writers as Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh). For him, rather, it was the economic and political dislocations which followed--labor unrest; rising unemployment, especially after 1929; the upsurge of Fascist-Nazi totalitarianism--which fired a lively imagination from the first...