Alfred Edgar Coppard

Alfred Edgar Coppard , 1878-1957, English author. Almost entirely self-educated, he worked at several clerical positions. His tales, written in a poetic and fanciful vein, include Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (1921), Nixey's Harlequin (1931), and Dark-eyed Lady (1947). He also wrote lyric verse that includes Hips and Haws (1922), Pelagea (1926), and Cherry Ripe (1935).

Bibliography: See his collected tales (1948).

Coppard, A. E. ( Alfred Edgar Coppard) (1878–1957), poet and short story writer. His first collection of short stories, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (1921), established his name. Hips and Haws (1922) was his first collection of verse, and thereafter he produced a book almost every year until the early 1950s. The deceptive simplicity of Coppard's stories conceals a widely admired technical skill; many of his tales are set in robust country backgrounds, and display a deep sympathy for the oddity and misfit.

Kubin, Alfred (1877–1959). Austrian graphic artist, painter, and writer, born at Leitmeritz (Litoměřice) in Bohemia. After working as a photographer's assistant, he went to Munich to study art in 1898. From 1906 he lived mainly at Zwickledt in Upper Austria, although he travelled a good deal. He was a friend of Kandinsky and showed his work in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1912, but his preoccupations were very different to those usually associated with the group. His work shows a taste for the morbid and fantastic, which he combined with pessimistic social satire and allegory. Often he depicted weird creatures in the kind of murky nightmare world associated with Odilon Redon, whom he met in 1905. Kubin's imagery reflects his disturbed and traumatic life (he had an unhappy childhood, attempted suicide on his mother's grave in 1896, and in 1903 underwent a mental breakdown after the death of his fiancée). He was obsessed with the theme of death (he is said to have liked to watch corpses being recovered from the river) and with the idea of female sexuality as a symbol of death. In 1909 he published a fantastical novel, Die andere Seite (The Other Side), which he illustrated himself. He also illustrated many other books, often ones whose subject-matter matched his own macabre interests, such as the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. From the 1920s his reputation was widespread and he was influential on the Surrealists. His spidery style changed little throughout his career. A translation of a collection of autobiographical essays was published in 1983 as Alfred Kubin's Autobiography.