Rex Warner

Rex Warner 1905-86, English author, b. Birmingham, grad. Oxford, 1928. A classical scholar noted for his translations from Greek and Latin, Warner taught in England, Egypt, and the United States. He was profoundly influenced by Kafka, and his early novels are expressionist allegories concerning problems of power; they include The Wild Goose Chase (1937) and The Aerodrome (1941), his masterpiece. Warner also wrote several historical novels, including The Young Caesar (1958) and Pericles the Athenian (1963); his essays, such as The Cult of Power (1946) and Men of Athens (1973), were also influential.

Warner, Rex (1905–86), poet, novelist, and translator, educated at Wadham College, Oxford, where he was a close friend of Auden and Day-Lewis. His first volume of poetry, Poems (1937), shares their Messianic revolutionary fervour. Warner's early novels, which include The Wild Goose Chase (1937), The Professor (1938), and The Aerodrome (1941), are more sombre, Kafkaesque political parables, which reflect the gathering gloom of the 1930s. His later fiction is based largely on Greek or Roman historical subjects, and he also translated the Medea (1944), Hippolytus (1950), and Helen (1951) of Euripides, and the Prometheus Bound (1947) of Aeschylus.