SOURCE: "The Mysterious Allen Upward," in The American Scholar, Vol. 59, 1990, pp. 53-65.

In the following essay, Davie explores the enigma of Upward's virtual disappearance from literary history, and discusses The East End of Europe in detail.

Allen Upward (b. 1863) remains a mystery man. I have no hope here of dispelling the mystery, not even of casting anything but very tentative light on it. My intention is only to emphasize that the mystery persists; that it is unaccountable; and that, so long as it persists, our pretensions to chart the intellectual history of our times, or the times of our grandfathers, are hollow. It is not after all as if we were dealing with a figure from the sixteenth century or earlier; Upward died by his own hand no longer ago than 1926. How can it be that a figure so historically recent, by no means a recluse but on...