Peake, Mervyn Laurence (1911–68), author of three Gothic fantasy novels, Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959), which describe the life of Titus, 77th earl of Groan in his decaying ancestral home of Gormenghast castle, his struggle to escape from it and to find a new identity. Peake in his lifetime was better known as an illustrator. He excelled at the grotesque and macabre, and his drawings for Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (1941) and the two Alice books (1946 and 1954) are among his finest work, as are those for the Grimm Brothers' Household Tales (1946).
— Gillian Avery
