Ruthven Todd

Ruthven Campbell Todd (pronounced 'riven') (14 June 1914 – 11 October 1978) was a Scottish poet, artist and novelist, best known as an editor of the works of William Blake, and as a writer of children's books. He wrote detective fiction also under the pseudonym R. T. Campbell.

Biography

Born in Edinburgh, Todd was educated at Fettes College and Edinburgh College of Art. After a time in the office of his father, an architect, he worked for two years as an agricultural labourer on Mull. He then started a career in copy-writing and journalism, while writing poetry and novels, living in Edinburgh, London, and later Tilty Mill near Dunmow in Essex (later rented to poet and novelist Elizabeth Smart).

He was involved with the surrealists at the time of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition. During the 1930s, he was friendly with Dylan Thomas, Geoffrey Grigson, Humphrey Jennings, David Gascoyne and Wyndham Lewis, contributing to the Lewis issue of Julian Symons's Twentieth Century Verse. Lewis recruited Todd to keep awake the dozing Ezra Pound, whose portrait Lewis was painting. A character based on Todd was included in Symons' first detective story, The Immaterial Murder Case. Todd's two allegorical novels Over the Mountain and The Lost Traveller both feature protagonists on symbolic journeys; Todd acknowledged the influence of Lewis and Rex Warner on the latter novel.Over the Mountain, a satire on fascism, has its hero travel to a dystopian nation with an oppressive government. During World War II he was a conscientious objector. He moved to America in 1947, where he held a position at a university in Iowa, and ran the Weekend Press during the 1950s. He contributed to children's literature, with the fifties Space Cat series.