Author. He received world-wide acclaimed as a prolific English author in the first half of the 20th century, excelling in poetry and novels. Besides adults, he included children in his audience of readers. For his “Collected Stories for Children” containing seventeen fairy tales, he was the recipient of the 1947 Carnegie Medal for Literature. The Carnegie Medal is the oldest and most prestigious award offered for children's books to a British subject. This was the first time that a collection of stories had received this award. In 1921 his novel “Memoirs of Midget” made him the third recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the category of fiction. His father, James Edward de la Mare, was a banker's clerk of French Huguenot ancestry, and his mother, Lucy Browning, was his father's second wife and her father had been an author. When he was four years old, his mother became a widow with six children. His formal education consisted of attending St. Paul's Cathedral School in London, and going directly to Anglo-American Oil for employment as a bookkeeper assistant for eighteen years. He began writing poetry and short stories in the late 1890s, publishing his first short story, “Kismet,” in the weekly high-society magazine, “Sketch” in 1895. His first collection of poems, “Songs of Childhood,” was successfully published under the pen name of Walter Ramal. With his 1908 publication of his novel, “Henry Brocken” and another collection, “Poems, de la Mare,” he was given a Civil List pension of about $130 a month, thus allowing him to terminate his employment and focusing on his writing full-time. As a married man with four children, the pension allayed the financial demands of being the breadwinner. Instead of receiving money from publisher for “Henry Brocken,” he was surprised that he had received an invoice for $5.25 for “excess proof corrections.” Following World War I, he became associated with the Georgian movement of literature, which drew criticism of his work in the 1920s from the modern writers with serious themes in free verse. In 1923 he edited the anthology, “Come Hither,” which contains a collection of Georgian poets' writings. He was an excellent writer of horror tales, which are included in “The Riddle and other Stories” in 1923, “The Connoisseur and other Stories” in 1926, “On the Edge” in 1930, and “The Wind Blows Over” in 1936. In 1971 his collection of stories for “Eight Tales” was published for the first time in a book as these stories had been earlier published individually under his pen name Walter Ramal. American literary critic Edward Wagenknecht wrote the forward page in “Eight Tales.” He repeated words in his poems that he liked: Winter, snow, the time of day, symbols of birth and death, seasons and their fruits. Sometimes he invented his own silly words to make a rhyme. It is said that his poems are read for mere enchantment. He was an admirer, and later close friend, of author Thomas Hardy to the point of writing the poem, “Thomas Hardy.” In the last days of his life, Hardy had his wife read to him de la Mare's most remembered poem “The Listeners.” Sources state that Hardy said afterwards, “That is possibly the finest poem of the century.” In 1930 he wrote the introduction to poet Frank Kendon's autobiography, “The Small Years.” In 1940 the couple had moved into a large two-story brick home at 30 Montpelier Row in Twickenham, which has been marked with the British Blue Plaque noting this as his home. The same year his wife, Elfrida Ingpen, an actress who was 10 years his senior, was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease and died three years later. In 1947 he had a coronary occlusion, had a second one in 1956, and was bedridden for months before dying. With his writing declining after the first coronary, he published more collections of poems: “Inward Companion” in 1950, “O Lovely England” in 1952 and “The Winnowing Dream” in 1954. In 1955 he wrote “A Beginning and Other Stories”. He was cremated and his ashes are buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, where he had once been a choirboy.In 1969 “Walter de la Mare: The Complete Poems” was published after being edited by his grandson, Giles de la Mare. Most recently edited and published by Giles de la Mare are “Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1895–1926” in 1996, “Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1927–1956” in 2000, and “Walter de la Mare, Short Stories for Children” in 2006. He refused knighthood twice but later was given the Companion of Honour in 1948 and the Order of Merit in 1953. He received the Royal Society of Literature Polignac Prize in 1911 for “The Return” and the Foyle Poetry Prize in 1954. He received a Doctorate in Letters from Cambridge University, Bristol University, London University, and Oxford University along with a Honorary Fellow at Keble College, Oxford. He received a Doctorate in the Law of English from St. Andrews University. Containing 700 of the author's items, the Walter de la Mare Library is located in Bloomsbury, Central London. The last verse of his poem, “Vain Questioning” is inscribed on his grave marker.