Norman Douglas

(1868 - 1952)

After publishing several collections of travel writing on Italy and Tunisia, including Siren Land and Fountains in the Sand, Norman Douglas completed his novel South Wind in 1917 while living on Capri, having fled London after an arrest for gross indecency with a teenage boy. Douglas died in February 1952. Two months later his onetime friend Frieda Lawrence wrote in a letter to the screenwriter Dudley Nichols, “You wouldn’t have liked Douglas. He was, I think, the only wicked man I have known, in a medieval sense, but oh, so witty.