Perhaps best known today for Death of a Hero, which Orwell judged as the best novel of the First World War. Richard Aldington was a contemporary and friend of Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot. With Pound, Aldington and his wife, the American poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), founded the Imagist movement in 1912. Notable as a poet, translator, novelist and biographer, Aldington was also a major figure of the Modernist era. This detailed biography, the first to be published, includes a critical appraisal of his major writings.

From the late 1930s Aldington lived in the United States, working first on his major anthology Poetry of the English-Speaking World and then on his prize-winning biography, The Duke (on Wellington). His later works included a study of D. H. Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius, But . . and two controversial biographical studies, Pinorman and Lawrence of Arabia. Friends of his later years included Lawrence Durrell, Roy Campbell, Henry Williamson and Alister Kershaw.

Aldington was first and foremost an individualist, who had no time for bureaucracy or politics, including Communism. Nonetheless, since the early 1930s, when the Russian translation of Death of a Hero was praised by Maxim Gorky, Aldington has been rated in Russia as one of the foremost English-language writers of the 20th century. Three weeks before his death in July 1962, Aldington made a triumphal Russian tour as guest of the Soviet Writers' Union.