He also produced several volumes of poetry, as well as a large number of works of biography and literary criticism, including A Nest of Tigers: The Sitwells in Their Times (1968); Virginia Woolf and Her World (1975); Edward Lear and His World (1977); Thrown to the Woolfs: Leonard and Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press (1978); Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend (1980); Three Literary Friendships: Byron & Shelley, Rimbaud & Verlaine, Robert Frost & Edward Thomas (1984); and Christopher Isherwood: A Personal Memoir (1987).

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It is often forgotten that Lehmann also wrote two novels, Evil Was Abroad (1938) and In the Purely Pagan Sense (1976), which was later republished in 1985 as a "Gay Modern Classic."

As Robert K. Martin observes in his essay on Lehmann's novels, while the first book is "discreet," and only "hints about the role of homosexual relationships," the second "has a much greater frankness about sexuality . . . this new openness means that In the Purely Pagan Sense is a fascinating guide to sexual mores from the 1920s through the 1950s."

Both novels, Martin asserts, "offer a serious exploration of the significance of sexuality and of the ways in which a recognition of homosexuality may offer a means to an altered perception of all one's responses to life."

Lehmann died in London on April 7, 1987, a few weeks short of his eightieth birthday.

In its first century of existence, gay male autobiography has become increasingly more open, frank, and unapologetic.

The Bloomsbury circle's open acceptance of erotic license and hostility toward social convention are important elements in the history of homosexuality among the English upper classes in the first half of the twentieth century.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

The gay and lesbian press is of prime importance in sustaining a frequently embattled minority and has been crucial in the development of a national mass movement for gay rights.

Since World War II, the gay male novel has progressively flourished in England and especially in America.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

A twentieth-century British editor who fostered the careers of a number of important gay writers, J. R. Ackerley also wrote a small but significant body of gay literature that includes memoirs and drama.

One of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century, W. H. Auden found that his gayness led him to new insights into the universal impulse to love and enlarged his understanding of all kinds of relationships.

Gay American expatriate composer, writer, and translator Paul Bowles liked to examine sexuality from a dispassionate perspective for its psychological suggestiveness.

Germany's most celebrated and influential dramatist of the twentieth century, Brecht depicted homosexual desire in his early writings, where it is cloaked in ambiguity and tied to issues of power.

The English poet Rupert Brooke was bisexual, reflecting his sexuality in both his letters and his poetry.

Although Eliot tried to suppress the fact, The Waste Land is an elegy for a young Frenchman whom he met and loved in Paris and who died in the Great War in 1915.

One of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century and a tireless defender of humane values, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

The Anglo-American writer Thom Gunn was a major gay poet and a perceptive critic of gay poetry.

A major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, Christopher Isherwood created gay characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of personality and an emblem of their common humanity.

Although overt homosexuality is absent from William Plomer's novels and poems, the relevance of his sexuality to his work is evident.

Throughout her life, poet and novelist Edith Sitwell surrounded herself with gay men, some of whom became her artistic collaborators. Although it is not clear that she ever experienced a sustained sexual relationship with anyone of either sex, her closest emotional bond was with another woman.

In his poetry and his autobiography, Stephen Spender wrote about his homosexual experiences in his early life.

The English biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey spoke openly of his homosexuality to his Bloomsbury friends, but his openly gay works were published only after his death.

The multifaceted Gore Vidal is important in the gay literary heritage because of the straightforwardness with which he pursued gay themes and included gay characters in his work.

Conflicted over his own sexuality, Tennessee Williams wrote directly about homosexuality only in his short stories, his poetry, and his late plays.

Passionate friendships with women were essential to the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf.