William Morris

William Morris was a poet, novelist, translator, designer, printer and revolutionary socialist, and he refused to treat any of those as separate occupations. He believed that how things are made determines how people live, and organized his entire career around the argument. The firm he founded remade Victorian interiors; the Kelmscott Press remade the printed book; his translations opened Norse saga to English readers. Late in life he wrote the prose romances, The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World's End among them, that effectively invented modern fantasy, and which Tolkien and Lewis both read closely. He gave his last decade largely to socialist organizing, lecturing in halls and on street corners, and wrote News from Nowhere as an argument about what work might be for.