CLASSICSARTHUR ANNESLEY RONALD FIRBANK was born into a prosperous family in London in 1886. He published his first book, Odette d’Antrevernes and A Study in Temperament, in 1905, before studying at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he converted to Catholicism but did not complete a degree. The novel Vainglory (1915) announced the author as ‘Ronald Firbank’ for the first time. It was rapidly followed by a succession of novels that achieved instant cult status, from Inclinations (1916), Caprice (1917) and Valmouth (1919) to The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), Sorrow in Sunlight, renamed at the suggestion of the American author Carl van Vechten as Prancing Nigger (1924), and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926). Prancing Nigger was Firbank’s sole commercial success, and he paid for the publication of his other books. He lived an itinerant, often obscure life, spending the duration of the First World War in Oxford, but the rest of his time moving between London, the Italian Riviera, Paris, Rome, North Africa and even Cuba and Jamaica. His lifelong poor health culminated in his death in Rome, probably due to lung failure, at the age of forty, just before the appearance of Cardinal Pirelli. Firbank is buried in Rome’s Verano cemetery.
RICHARD CANNING has published extensively on Ronald Firbank, the literature of the inter-war period and the history of gay literature. He is author of Gay Fiction Speaks (2001) and Hear Us Out (2004), Editors’ Choice award-winner at the Lambda Literary Awards, as well as lives of Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster (2008 and 2009). He has edited an anthology of American AIDS fiction, Vital Signs (2008), and two volumes of gay male shorter fiction, Between Men (2007) and Between Men 2 (2009). His most recent publication is the essay anthology Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (2009). For the past decade, with the support of a Leverhulme Trust award, he has been researching a major critical biography of Ronald Firbank. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, Richard Canning has taught at Warwick and Sheffield universities, and is presently Head of English and Senior Lecturer at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln.