John Lehmann born 2 June 1907 (d. 1987)John Frederick Lehmann (born Bourne End, Buckinghamshire) was an English poet and man of letters, and one of the foremost literary editors of the twentieth century, founding the periodicals New Writing and The London Magazine.
The son of journalist Rudolph Lehmann, and brother of actress Beatrix Lehmann and novelist Rosamond Lehmann, he was educated at Eton and read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, his time at both of which he considered 'lost years'.
In 1928 he had a slim volume of his poems privately printed , but the next volume of verse was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. The Woolfs offered him an 'apprenticeship' - as dogsbody and secretary - an experience he later caustically documented in Thrown To The Woolfs. In August 1932, he turned his back on the Hogarth Press and departed for Vienna. Part of the legendary Auden generation, he spent the early 1930s in a politically precarious but sexually liberated central Europe, engrossed in leftist politics, artistic pursuits and gay hedonism.
He returned to England to found the popular periodical in book format, New Writing (1936-1941) which proved of great influence on literature of the period, and an outlet for writers such as Christopher Isherwood and W H Auden.
After re-establishing relations with the Woolfs, he returned as managing director of Hogarth Press between 1938 and in 1946 he created his own firm John Lehmann Ltd with his sister Rosamond, publishing new works by authors such as Sartre and Stendhal, and discovering talents like Thom Gunn and Laurie Lee. The venture was not a commercial success however.
In 1954 he founded The London Magazine, remaining as editor until 1961, following which he was a frequent lecturer in the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and completed his three volume autobiography, Whispering Gallery (1955), I Am My Brother (1960), The Ample Proposition (1966).
In The Purely Pagan Sense (1976) is an autobiographical record of his homosexual love life in England and pre-war Germany, discreetly written in the form of a novel. He also wrote the biographies Edith Sitwell (1952), Virginia Woolf and Her World (1975), Thrown To The Woolfs (1978) and Rupert Brooke (1980).
In the long run, Lehmann is not so much remembered as a poet as for his influential editorship, his memoirs of inter-war literary life and his volumes of autobiography.
He died in London on 7 April 1987.