David Lindsay

David Lindsay (1876–1945) was born in London to Scottish parents and worked for two decades as an insurance broker before publishing his first and best-known novel, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), at forty-four. A philosophical fantasy following a man transported to a distant planet where he meets a succession of alien beings, each embodying a different and ultimately inadequate philosophy of existence, it sold poorly and was largely ignored in his lifetime; decades later it was rediscovered as a major influence on later fantasy and science-fiction writers, C. S. Lewis among them. He wrote several further novels without commercial success and died in Sussex, England, at sixty-eight.