The People of the Ruins

Edward Richard Buxton Shanks (1892-1953) was an English writer, known as a war poet of World War I. He was an academic, journalist, literary critic and biographer. He also wrote some science fiction. He was educated at Merchant Taylor's School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He served in World War I with the British Army in France, but was invalided out in 1915, and did administrative work. He was later a literary reviewer, working for the London Mercury and for a short while a lecturer at the University of Liverpool. He then wrote for the Evening Standard, to 1935. His works include: Songs (1915), Hilaire Bello: The Man and his Work (with C. Creighton Mandell) (1916), The Queen of China (1919), The People of the Ruins (1920), The Island of Youth (1921), Poems 1912-1932 (1933), Tom Tiddler's Ground (1934), Old King Cole (1936), Edgar Allan Poe (1937), Queer Street (1938), Rudyard Kipling: A Study in Literature and Political Ideas (1940) and Poems 1939-1952 (1953).