Reginald "Rex" Ernest Warner (9 March 1905 – 24 June 1986) was an English classicist, writer, and translator who is best remembered for The Aerodrome (1941). Warner was described by V. S. Pritchett as "the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade of ideas produced".
Early life and education
Warner was born in Birmingham, England, and brought up mainly in Gloucestershire, the son of the Frederic Ernest Warner, vicar of Amberley, and his wife Kathleen Luce, daughter of John James Luce. He was educated at St. George's School in Harpenden and at Wadham College, Oxford, where he associated with W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Stephen Spender, and published in Oxford Poetry. He obtained a 1st in Classical Moderations in 1925 and later graduated with a 3rd in English in 1928.
Career
After his graduation, Warner spent time teaching, some of it in Egypt. Warner's debut story, "Holiday", appeared in the New Statesman in 1930. 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. His second novel, The Professor, published around the time of the Nazi 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. The Converts, a novel about Saint Augustine and dedicated it to the Greek poet and diplomat George Seferis, reflected Warner's own increasing devotion to Christianity.
Personal life
Warner retired to England in 1973 and died in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, in 1986. He was married three times but to two women. His first marriage was to Frances Chamier Grove in 1929.