A collection of these drawings is still in the possession of his family.

Peake first made his reputation as a painter and illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s, when he lived in London, and he was commissioned to produce portraits of well-known people. Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children ('Letters from a Lost Uncle'), stage and radio plays, and Mr Pye, a relatively tightly-structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero. Tolkien, but his surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J.R.R. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books, though the Titus books would be more accurate: the three works that exist were the beginning of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, following his protagonist Titus Groan from cradle to grave, but Peake's untimely death prevented completion of the cycle, which is now commonly but erroneously referred to as a trilogy. Though he was mostly forgotten today he is recognized as being one of the pillars of fantasy, regardless of his cult status.Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English modernist writer, artist, poet and illustrator. Which is odd to me because, despite it's short length, is just as fascinating as the first two! The first two of the trilogy weren't commercially successful they were critically acclaimed. The third Titus Alone was different beast altogether, being quite bizarre and much shorter than the other two. The first two, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, are all set in the enormous keep of the same name. While they're no dragons, elves and magic the books are quite fantastical, maybe not in the way that most people would think, and are also very complex. They're very much different from the works of Lewis and Tolkien. The books aren't quite like anything I've ever read concerning fantasy. But all in all the world of Gormenghast and it's characters are very much interesting. Tolkien are the most well known and famous, while Peake himself remains something of a cult figure. Of course I'm talking about Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. About last year I had gotten what many would consider the most underrated fantasy trilogy from the forties.

The illustrated gormenghast trilogy