Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the Vorticists' journal, BLAST . His novels include his pre-World War I-era novel Tarr , and The Human Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass , Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta , set in the afterworld. A fourth volume of The Human Age, The Trial of Man, was begun by Lewis but left in a fragmentary state at the time of his death.

Lewis was reputedly born on his father's yacht off the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. His English mother and American father separated about 1893. His mother subsequently returned to England, where Lewis was educated, first at Rugby School, then at the Slade School of Art, University College, London, before spending most of the 1910s travelling around Europe and studying art in Paris.