L.H. Myers

English novelist
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Also known as: Leopold Hamilton Myers
Quick Facts
In full:
Leopold Hamilton Myers
Born:
1881, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.
Died:
April 8, 1944, Marlow, Buckinghamshire (aged 63)
Also Known As:
Leopold Hamilton Myers

L.H. Myers (born 1881, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.—died April 8, 1944, Marlow, Buckinghamshire) was an English philosophical novelist whose most compelling works explore spiritual turmoil and despair.

Myers studied at Eton College, continued his education in Germany, and then briefly attended the University of Cambridge. In 1901, when his father died, he turned his attention exclusively to writing, although he also traveled widely, living for some time in Colorado.

Myers’s first novel, The Orissers (1922), marked him as an author of distinction. His next novel, The Clio (1925), reflected the then-fashionable ideas of Aldous Huxley. His major work, an Indian tetralogy set in the late 16th century at the time of Akbar the Great, consists of The Near and the Far (1929), Prince Jali (1931), The Root and the Flower (1935), and The Pool of Vishnu (1940). The tetralogy was published in 1940 as a single volume entitled The Near and the Far. A feeling of embittered despair also emerges from this monumental work. Four years after its publication Myers committed suicide.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.