Lewis was innate in a racing yacht off the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. His mother was British, his father Western. He was educated within England, foremost at Rugby School, then at a Slade School of Art in London, before spending virtually all of the 1900s travelling as much as Europe & researching art around Paris.

It was in the years 1913-15 that he observed the painting style for which he is better known in todays world, a style which his friend Ezra Pound dubbed Vorticism. Lewis discovered a heavy structure of Cubist painting appealing, but said it did non seem "alive" in comparison Futurist art, which, conversely, lacked structure. Vorticism combined these ii movements inside the strikingly spectacular critique of modernism. Around his early works, particularly versions of village life within Brittany showing dancers (ca. 1910-12), Lewis was probably further influenced per process philosophy of Henri Bergson than he was later prepared to admit. When a brief tenure at the Omega Workshops, Lewis had a disagreement using the founder Roger Fry and left with many Omegthe creative person to begin a competing workshop known as Vertigo.

Fallowing a Vorticists' merely exhibition around 1915, a movement broke higher, largely following of World War I. Lewis was posted to the american front, & served as an Official War Artist 1917-1919, painting one of his better known works, A Battery Shelled, from either sketches mass produced in Vimy Ridge. His number one novel Tarr was published within 1918, & is one of a key modernist texts.

Per late 1920s, Lewis was not painting such, instead concentrating in writing. His major theoretical & ethnical statement from either this time period is The Art of Existence Ruled (1926, ed. Dasenbrock, 1989). Instance & American Human (1927)occurs as ethnic & philosophic discussion that includes the penetrating critique of James Joyce which is still scan. Philosophically, Lewis attacked a "time philosophy" of Bergson, Alexander & others.

In The Apes of God (1930) he wrote the biting satiric attack on the Sitwell family, which did not support him to become accepted into a literary globe, & his book Hitler (1931), which was insufficiently critical of its subject possibly at this early date, stimulated him to exist as shunned by several. He late wrote A Hitler Cult (1939), the book which firmly revoked his sooner willingness to email Hitler, but a damage was done, & Lewis was to remain an isolated figure. In the Thirties Auden called him "that lonely old volcano of the Right."

Notwithstanding it was when you took a years 1934-37 that he wrote A Retaliation for Love (1937), just about a time period prior to a Spanish Civil War. However inside print, these are widely repute his better novel. An spectacular book of critical essays belongs to this time; entitled Men Forswearing Art (1934), it includes one of a 1st comment in William Faulkner, and the renowned essay in Hemingway.

Despite existence better known for his writing than his painting inside his late years, paintings from either a Thirties & 1940s constitute some of his right-known function. It is in the main portraits, and include pictures of Edith Sitwell (1935), T. S. Eliot (1938 and again in 1949) and Ezra Pound (1938). A Surrender of Barcelona (1936-38) makes a important statement all about the Spanish Civil War.

Lewis spent World War II in the United States and Canada. He returned to England inside 1945. By 1951, he was entirely blind. Inside 1950 he published a autobiographical Rude Assignment, and followed it sustaining a semi-autobiograpical novel Self Condemned, the major late statement. He died within 1957. Universally concerned within Roman Catholicism, he nevertheless never converted. Inside recent years there has been the renewal of critical & biographic interest within Lewis & his act, & he is nowadays regarded as a major British creative person & writer of the twentieth century.