Page "John Lehmann" Paragraph 2

After a spell as a journalist in Vienna, he returned to England to found the popular periodical New Writing ( 1936 – 1940 ) in book format, which proved a great influence on literature of the period and an outlet for writers such as Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden.

Lehmann included many of these authors in his anthology Poems for Spain which he edited with Stephen Spender.

With the onset of the Second World War and paper rationing, New Writing's future was uncertain and so Lehmann wrote New Writing in Europe for Pelican Books, one of the first critical summaries of the writers of the 1930s in which he championed the authors who had been the stars of New Writing-Auden and Spender-and also his close friend Tom Wintringham and Wintringham's ally, the emerging George Orwell.

Wintringham reintroduced Lehmann to Allen Lane of Penguin Books, who secured paper for The Penguin New Writing a monthly book-magazine, this time in paperback.

The first issue featured Orwell's essay Shooting an Elephant.

Occasional hardback editions combined with the magazine Daylight appeared sporadically, but it was as Penguin New Writing that the magazine survived until 1950.