Geoffrey Scott and the Berenson Circle Literary and Aesthetic Life in the Early 20th Century

This is the first full-length biography of writer, architect, esthetician and editor Geoffrey Scott (1884-1929). His Architecture of Humanism was considered the most important statement about architecture since Ruskin and was for years used as a basic text in architectural schools in England and the States, and is still in print. The Portrait of Zelide won the James Tait Memorial Black Prize and is often compared to the best of Lytton Strachey's biographies. When Colonel Ralph Isham brought the famous Boswell papers to the States in the late twenties, he commissioned Scott to edit them. Scott was also a prominent figure in social and intellectual circles in London, Florence and New York. A protegé of Bernard and Mary Berenson, he spent many years living and working at the art historian's famous Villa I Tatti outside Florence (which, in fact, he helped create). Married to the wealthy Lady Sybil Cutting during the War, he had a tempestuous affair with Vita Sackville-West. Edith Wharton, John Maynard Keynes and other Bloomsbury figures were among his friends. This biography focuses particularly on his letters, found in the Villa I Tatti and almost entirely unpublished.