author
Percy Lubbock
1879–1965
A graceful English critic and biographer, he is best remembered for shaping how readers and writers think about the novel. His influential book The Craft of Fiction helped make literary criticism itself part of the modern conversation about storytelling.
3 Audiobooks
The Craft of Fiction
by Percy Lubbock
Roman pictures
by Percy Lubbock
About the author
Born in London on June 4, 1879, Percy Lubbock became known as an essayist, critic, and biographer with a particular gift for clear, elegant prose. He studied at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and early in his career served as librarian of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Lubbock wrote on major literary figures including Samuel Pepys, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edith Wharton, but his most lasting reputation rests on The Craft of Fiction (1921). That book, sometimes debated and sometimes admired, became an important early attempt to explain how novels are built and why point of view and form matter.
He spent much of his later life in Italy and was appointed CBE. Though not always a household name today, he remains an important figure for readers interested in the history of criticism and in the art of the novel itself.