Edward Richard Buxton Shanks was an English poet, journalist, and literary critic who first gained recognition as a war poet during the First World War. Born in London in 1892, Shanks was educated at Merchant Taylors' School before attending Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his history degree in 1913. During his university years, he also edited the student publication Granta. With the outbreak of World War I, he served in the British Army in France but was invalided out in 1915, spending the remainder of the conflict in administrative roles.
Following the war, Shanks established a diverse career in journalism and academia. He worked as a literary reviewer for the London Mercury from 1919 to 1922 and briefly lectured at the University of Liverpool in 1926. He later transitioned into mainstream journalism, serving as the chief leader-writer for the Evening Standard between 1928 and 1935. Throughout this period, he was highly regarded for his critical essays, biographies, and poetry.
In addition to his poetry and criticism, Shanks made a notable contribution to early speculative fiction with his 1920 novel, The People of the Ruins. This post-apocalyptic science-fiction story follows a protagonist who awakes from suspended animation to find a ruined, technologically regressed Britain of the future. Reflecting the anxieties of its era, the novel contains a strong anti-communist subtext, imagining a world devastated by Marxist revolutionaries.
