William Morris
1834 – 1896
Morris was an English textile designer, poet, artist, writer, and socialist activist. Besides being an artist William Morris was a prolific writer of poetry, fiction, essays, and translations of ancient and medieval texts. In the last nine years of his life, Morris wrote a series of imaginative fictions. These novels have been credited as important milestones in the history of fantasy fiction because, while other writers wrote of foreign lands or of dream worlds or the future, Morris’s works were the first to be set in an entirely invented fantasy world.
Morris’s prose style in these novels has been as among the most lyrical and enchanting fantasies in the English language.
Morris is considered to have influenced the writings of C. S. Lewis (who wrote the Narnia series) as well as J. R. R. Tolkien.
The House of the Wolfings
Fantasy
An archaic-styled heroic romance about Gothic tribes defending their home against Roman invaders
The Roots of the Mountains
Heroic fantasy
A panoramic tale of interlinked clans in Burgdale facing invasion, social change, and love
News from Nowhere
Utopian fiction
A Victorian socialist wakes in a future England transformed into a peaceful, egalitarian commonwealth of art, nature, and voluntary labour
A Dream of John Ball
Historical fantasy / time-slip fiction
A man dreams that he lives through the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and meets the radical preacher John Ball