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[14], 539, [3] pages. Front board weak. Decorative cover. Some endpaper discoloration and foxing. Minor page foxing and soiling. The contents are Parts I, II, III, IV and V. Some pages uncut. Henry Major Tomlinson (21 June 1873 - 5 February 1958) was a British writer and journalist. He was known for anti-war and travel writing, novels and short stories, especially of life at sea. He was born and died in London. He worked as a reporter for the Morning Leader newspaper; he traveled up the Amazon River for it. His first book, The Sea and the Jungle (1912), was written after he had made the expedition up the Amazon. Though ignored at the time, it remains his most representative book and is often reminiscent in style, as are his other works, of Thoreau and Emerson. Among his novels are Gallions Reach (1927), All Our Yesterdays (1930), and Morning Light (1946), but he is perhaps better known for his travel books: London River (1921), The Turn of the Tide (1945), and Malay Waters (1950). In World War I he was an official correspondent for the British Army, in France. He was greatly affected by the futile slaughter of World War I. In 1917 he returned to work with H. W. Massingham on The Nation, which opposed the war. He left the paper in 1923, when Massingham resigned because of a change of owner and political line. His 1931 book Norman Douglas was one of the first biographies of that scandalous but then much admired writer. It "is a very fine book.Certain of its scenes, as that when the principal character drives from G.H.Q. to revisit his old comrades in the trenches, are perfection itself" - Falls An ibiblio posting on line advises: Professional writers should not read Tomlinson. No doubt any who try will throw away their keyboards in disgust when they compare their own frail abilities. His style and thinking must have been influenced by Emerson and Thoreau but is really that of the King James Bible, Homer and Shakespeare. His subject matter is often natural history or the foolishness of mortals who do not always realize the transcendental reality behind a common glance. His accounts of the sea, travel, and the Great War have not been surpassed. He is one author who produces quotable paragraphs on each page and can be read with pleasure again and again. It is time today to acknowledge his greatness. His antiwar novel, All Our Yesterdays, begins: The traffic of Dockland, where my omnibus stopped, loosened into a broadway. There the vans and lorries, released from the congestion of narrow streets, opened out and made speed in an uproar of iron-shod wheels and hooves on granite blocks. I could hear progress. It was on its way. It was pouring about in a triumphant muddle of noise too loud to be doubted. There was no need to repose on faith in the favored evolution of man. That wonderful conjuration of good things out of this planet by the steam-engine and the cotton-jenny was dominant. Limited edition of 1025, Signed by the Author. This is number 834.
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