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Plays for the Theatre of Tomorrow Series, no. 2

Inscribed by author [?]: "To Alan Napier with best wishes from his friend [illegible] Nichols, September, 32"


Robert Nichols (1893-1944) was the wartime author of Ardours and Endurances; Also, A Faun's Holiday & Poems & Phantasies, a collection of war poetry published in 1917.

Nichols, who struck up friendships with fellow war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke (the latter was killed in action in 1915), was a Winchester and Oxford-educated Georgian poet.

Nichols' First World War military service - which lasted from from 1914-16 - saw him participate in the Battle of Loos in 1915 in the role of artillery officer.

His front-line service was however brief - after just a few weeks serving in the trenches he was invalided home with shell shock; an illness which caused him to be sent home to England in 1916.

Robert Nichols (poet)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols (September 16 or September 6, 1893 – December 17, 1944) was an English writer, known as a war poet of World War I, and a playwright.

He was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford. He served in the Royal Artillery as an officer from 1914 to 1914, in the fighting at Loos and the Somme. He was then invalided out, with shell shock.

He began to give poetry readings, in 1917. In 1918 he was a member of an official British propaganda mission to the USA.

After the war he moved in social circles in London; Aldous Huxley became a long-term friend and correspondent, and he wooed Nancy Cunard with sonnets. He was Professor of English Literature at the University of Tokyo, from 1921 to 1924. He then worked in the theatre and cinema. The play Wings over Europe (1928), with Maurice Browne, was a Broadway hit.

He lived in Germany and Austria in 1933-34. He then settled in the south of France until he left in June 1940.

His father was John Bowyer Buchanan Nichols, the poet. He married Norah Denny in 1922.

On November 11th, 1985, Nichols was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner[1]



Jim Tully (June 3, 1891 - June 22, 1947), was a vagabond, pugilist, and American writer. His critical and commercial success in the 1920s and 30s may qualify him as the greatest long shot in American literature.

Born near St. Marys, Ohio to James Dennis and Bridget Marie Lawler Tully, an Irish immigrant ditch-digger and his wife, Tully enjoyed a relatively happy but impoverished childhood until the death of his mother in 1892. Unable to care for him, his father sent him to an orphanage in Cincinnati. He remained there for six years until the loneliness and misery became more than he could bear. What further education he acquired came in the hobo camps, boxcars, railroad yards, and public libraries scattered across the country. Finally, weary of the road, he arrived in Kent, Ohio, where he worked as a chain maker, professional boxer, and tree surgeon. He also began to write, mostly poetry published in the local newspapers. He moved to Hollywood in 1912, when he began writing in earnest. His literary career took two distinct paths. He became one of the first reporters to cover Hollywood. As a free-lancer he was not constrained by the studios and wrote about Hollywood celebrities (including Charlie Chaplin, for whom he had worked) in ways that they did not always find agreeable. For these pieces, rather tame by current standards, he became known as the most-hated man in Hollywood—a title he relished. Less lucrative but closer to his heart were the books he wrote about his life on the road and the American underclass. He also wrote an affectionate memoir of his childhood with his extended Irish family, as well as novels on prostitution, boxing, Hollywood, and a travel book. While some of the more graphic books ran afoul of the censors, they also garnered both commercial success and critical acclaim from, among others, H.L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, and Rupert Hughes, who wrote that Tully "has fathered the school of hard-boiled writing so zealously cultivated by Ernest Hemingway and lesser luminaries." Paul Bauer and Mark Dawidziak.