Life

The son of an Irish solicitor

Solicitor

Solicitors are lawyers who traditionally deal with any legal matter including conducting proceedings in courts. In the United Kingdom, a few Australian states and the Republic of Ireland, the legal profession is split between solicitors and barristers , and a lawyer will usually only hold one title...

, John Stewart Collis was educated at Rugby

Rugby School

Rugby School is a co-educational day and boarding school located in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire, England. It is one of the oldest independent schools in Britain.-History:...

 and Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

. A writer of biographies and other works, his first book on George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

, was published in 1925, followed by biographies of Havelock Ellis

Havelock Ellis

Henry Havelock Ellis, known as Havelock Ellis , was a British physician and psychologist, writer, and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He was co-author of the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and...

, Strindberg

August Strindberg

Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography,...

, Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

, the Carlyles

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...

 and Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...

. He is remembered largely for While Following the Plough (1946) and Down to Earth (1947: as one volume, The Worm Forgives the Plough, 1973), works inspired by the years he spent working as a farm labourer in Dorset

Dorset

Dorset , is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The county town is Dorchester which is situated in the south. The Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch joined the county with the reorganisation of local government in 1974...

 and Sussex

Sussex

Sussex , from the Old English Sūþsēaxe , is an historic county in South East England corresponding roughly in area to the ancient Kingdom of Sussex. It is bounded on the north by Surrey, east by Kent, south by the English Channel, and west by Hampshire, and is divided for local government into West...

 during the Second World War. His autobiography Bound upon a Course brought him belated recognition as a pioneer in the ecological movement, who wrote with imagination and authenticity of rural life.

A 2009 edition of The Worm Forgives the Plough was issued by Vintage Classics.
The writer and doctor Robert Collis was his twin and Maurice Collis

Maurice Collis

Maurice Stewart Collis was an administrator in Burma when it was part of the British Empire, and afterwards a writer on Southeast Asia, China and other historical subjects.-Life:...

, writer and biographer, was his elder brother.

Individual Works

• Shaw (1925)
• Forward to Nature (1927)
• Farewell to Argument (1935)
• The Sounding Cataract (1936)
• An Irishman's England (1937)
• While Following the Plough (1946)
• Down to Earth (1947)
• The Triumph of the Tree (1950)
• The Moving Waters (1955)
• Paths of Light (UK, 1959) / The World of Light (US, 1960)
• An Artist of Life (1959)
• Marriage and Genius: Strindberg and Tolstoy, Studies in Tragi-Comedy (1963)
• Leo Tolstoy (1969)
• Bound upon a Course: An Autobiography (1971)
• The Carlyles (1971)
• Christopher Columbus (1976)
• Living with a Stranger (1978)

Omnibus Editions

• The Vision of Glory (1972), containing selections from —
  • The Triumph of the Tree
  • The Moving Waters
  • Paths of Light
• The Worm Forgives the Plough (1973)
  • While Following the Plough
  • Down to Earth