Edward Shanks

Edward Richard Buxton Shanks was an English writer born in London on June 11, 1892, and educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he studied history and edited Granta, showing early on the literary interests that would shape the rest of his career.

He served in the First World War and became known first as a war poet. After the war, he wrote across several forms, including poetry, novels, criticism, biography, and journalism. He was also connected with academic and newspaper work, and sources describe him as a literary critic as well as a biographer.

Shanks is especially interesting because his books were not limited to one lane: alongside poetry and criticism, he also wrote science fiction, including The People of the Ruins. He died on May 4, 1953, and is remembered as a versatile early-20th-century man of letters whose writing reflects both the shock of war and a lively curiosity about ideas and society.