author
Leslie Burton Blades
b. 1891
A Colorado-born writer who lost his sight as a child, he drew on lived experience to write with unusual sympathy about blindness, resilience, and human feeling. His best-known work, Claire, helped make him a memorable early 20th-century voice.
1 Audiobook
Claire: The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, by a Blind Author
by Leslie Burton Blades
About the author
Born in 1891, Leslie Burton Blades grew up in a Colorado mining community. Contemporary descriptions of Claire say he was blinded at age nine in a fireworks accident and later spent six years at the Colorado State School for the Blind.
Blades is best known for Claire: The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, by a Blind Author, first published in 1919 and later preserved by Project Gutenberg and library catalogs. The novel was noted for the way it treated blindness from the inside, with an emotional directness that seems closely tied to the author's own experience.
Evidence from later catalog records also shows that he wrote poetry and made woodcarvings; To You Out There: Poems and Woodcarvings (1918-1973) was published in 1980 and edited by Harriet Blades. Reliable biographical details beyond these points are scarce, which gives his surviving work an even stronger sense of speaking for itself.