Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee (born June 26, 1914, Stroud, Gloucestershire, England—died May 13, 1997, Slad) was an English poet and prose writer best known for Cider with Rosie (1959), a memoir of the author’s boyhood in the Cotswold countryside.

Lee was educated in Stroud, where he was born, and nearby Slad, where he grew up. He eventually moved to London and traveled in Spain in the mid-1930s. Upon his return to England, he worked as a film scriptwriter (1940–43) and as an editor for the Ministry of Information (1944–45). Lee published several volumes of poetry in the 1940s and ’50s, but he achieved little recognition until his autobiographical book Cider with Rosie (U.S. title The Edge of Day) was published by Leonard Woolf in 1959. Cider with Rosie became an instant classic and was widely read in British schools. An account of Lee’s happy childhood in a secluded village, the book nostalgically evokes the simplicity and innocence of a vanished rural world. Lee returned to Slad in the 1960s and lived there until his death.

Lee wrote two more volumes of what became an autobiographical trilogy, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), a description of his walk to London and then across Spain just prior to that country’s civil war; and A Moment of War (1991), an account of his experiences in Spain during that war. Lee’s other works included the poetry collections The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947), and My Many-Coated Man (1955) and a collection of stories, I Can’t Stay Long (1976).