A writer of extraordinary versatility, William Plomer earned in his lifetime a reputation as a novelist, poet, writer of short and longer stories, editor, broadcaster, librettist (in collaboration with Benjamin Britten), and an indefatigable, if sometimes less than entirely forthright, autobiographer. He is most often remembered as the author of Turbott Wolfe (1925), a taboo-breaking book on racial relations in South Africa, the land of his birth. Begun when Plomer was nineteen and published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press before his twenty-third birthday, this remarkable first novel alone cements his reputation as a central figure of the modernist movement, and this book still attracts the attention of most of the critics currently concerned with the remarkable achievement of a man too long neglected. His more than thirty short stories, if less well-known to late-twentieth-century readers, are no less interesting.

As a close friend of two other important...