John Gray (Author)

John Gray

John Gray (born March 2, 1866 in London , † June 14, 1934 in Edinburgh ) was a British author and Roman Catholic priest .

biography

Gray was born the son of a carpenter in the London working-class district of Bethnal Green and worked as a librarian in the Foreign Office . Around 1890 he attracted attention in literary circles with his first poems in the aesthetic style of the fin de siècle and made the acquaintance of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde , who was his lover for a while. Gray's first volume of poetry, Silverpoints , was published in 1893 in a small edition , designed by Charles Ricketts as bibliophile. Gray also made a name for himself as a translator of French symbolists such as Mallarmé , Verlaine , Laforgue and Rimbaud , some of whose works he translated into English for the first time. Gray was considered a model for the title character in Wilde's novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray , which he himself always denied.

Gray converted to Catholicism in the late 1890s . He studied Catholic theology at the Scottish College in Rome and was ordained a priest in 1901 . He spent the rest of his life in Edinburgh , where he worked at St. Patrick's Church and as Rector at St. Peter. Gray lived with the French writer Marc-André Raffalovich .

In addition to his poems, Gray wrote the novel Park: A Fantastic Story . Many of his later works deal with Christian saints . He died in 1934 after a brief illness.

Works (selection)

• Silverpoints , poems (1893)
• Ad Matrem , poems (1904)
• The Long Road , poems (1926)
• Park: A Fantastic Story , Roman

literature

• Ian Fletcher : The Poems of John Gray. ELT Press, Greensboro, North Carolina 1988, ISBN 0-944318-00-2 .
• Brocard Sewell : In The Dorian Mode (A Life of John Gray: 1866-1934). Tabb House, Padstow, Cornwall 1983, ISBN 0-907018-18-1 .

Web links

• ABC John Gray