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Reginal Ernest Warner ( Rex) (9 March 1905 – 24 June 1986) was an English classics, writer, and translator. He is now probably best remembered for The Aerodrome (1941). Trash Fiction: Review of The AerodromeChris Hopkins, English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007 (pp. 138–57). Warner was described by V. S. Pritchett as "the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade of ideas produced"."Rex Warner, 81, Dies; Author and Translator". The New York Times, 17 July 1986
Warner's debut story, "Holiday", appeared in the New Statesman in 1930. His first collection, Poems, appeared in 1937. His poem, "Arms in Spain", a satire on Nazi Germany and Italian support for the Francoist Spain, has often been reprinted.Katharine Bail Hoskins, Today the Struggle: Literature and Politics in England during the Spanish Civil War. University of Texas Press, 1969 (p.230) He was also a contributor to Left Review. Warner was a great admirer of Franz Kafka and his fiction was "profoundly influenced" by Kafka's work. Warner's first three novels all reflect his anti-fascist beliefs; The Wild Goose Chase is in part a fantasy about the overthrow of a tyrannical government in a heroic revolution.Janet Montefiore. Men and Women writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History. Routledge, 1996. (pp. 16, 170, 201).John Clute, "Warner, Rex", in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Clute and Peter Nicholls. London, Orbit,1994. (p.1299-1300). His second novel, The Professor, published around the time of the Nazism Anschluss, is the story of a liberal academic whose compromises with a repressive government lead eventually to his arrest, imprisonment and murder "while attempting to escape". Contemporary reviewers saw parallels with the Austrian leaders Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg.
Although Warner was initially sympathetic to the Soviet Union, "the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact left him disillusioned with Communism". The Aerodrome is an allegory novel whose young hero is faced with the disintegration of his certainties about his loved ones, and with a choice between the earthy, animalistic life of his home village and the pure, efficient, emotionally detached life of an airman. The Times described The Aerodrome as Warner's "most perfectly accomplished novel". Why Was I Killed? (1943) is an afterlife fantasy with an anti-war theme.
Warner then abandoned contemporary allegory in favour of historical novels about Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, including Imperial Caesar, for which he was awarded the 1960 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Imperial Caesar was praised by John Davenport as "delightfully perceptive and funny", and by Storm Jameson as "brilliant, intelligent, continuously interesting. It has everything."Advertisement for Imperial Caesar, Encounter, November 1960, p. 81. The Converts, a novel about Saint Augustine, reflected Warner's own increasing devotion to Christianity. He dedicated it to the Greek poet and diplomat George Seferis.
Warner served in the Home Guard during the Second World War and also worked as a Latin teacher at a Grammar School in Morden as there was a shortage of teachers. From 1945 to 1947 he was in Athens as Director of the British Institute. At that time he became involved in numerous translations of classical Greek and Latin authors. His translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War for Penguin Classics sold over a million copies. He also translated Poems of George Seferis (1960).
Warner's time in Greece coincided with the early stages of the Greek Civil War, which ended with the Greek Communists defeated and suppressed. This formed the background to his book "Men of Stones: A Melodrama" (1949), depicting imprisoned leftists presenting King Lear in their prison camp.
In 1961 Warner was appointed Tallman Professor of Classics at Bowdoin College and from 1962 to 1973 he was a professor at the University of Connecticut. While he was in the United States he was interviewed for the book Authors Take Sides on Vietnam War (1967) and argued for withdrawal from Indochina.Cecil Woolf and John Bagguley (editors), Authors Take Sides on Vietnam, Peter Owen, 1967,(p.47).
Rex Warner retired to England in 1973 and died in Wallingford, Oxfordshire in 1986.
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