HARGRAVE, John (Gordon)

(1894-1982)

   UK writer and illustrator. At age 17 he became the chief cartoonist for the London Evening News; he also illustrated several books of interest, including a 1909 edition of Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Black Tales for White Children (coll 1914) by C.H.Stigland. His work was all in black-and-white, with effects that ran from the forceful to the jagged. He became involved in the Boy Scout movement during WWI, then left it to found a rival organization, the Kibbo Kift, whose principles he advocated in a quasi- UTOPIAN novel, Young Winkle (1925); he invented an automatic aircraft navigator; and he was involvedin Social Credit, a theory that advocated the redistribution of resources to increase purchasing power. Of his nonfiction, The Life and Death of Paracelsus (1951) is of note. His sf novel, The Imitation Man (1931),depicts the life of an artificially created homunculus with the power of ESP who causes a good deal of furore but soon dies.

   JC

   See also: SUPERMAN.