Writer, painter, and musician, born at Langar Rectory, Nottinghamshire, C England, UK. He studied at Cambridge, and became a sheep farmer in New Zealand (1859--64). On returning to England, he worked on his Utopian satire, Erewhon (1872) - the word is an inversion of "nowhere' - in which many conventional practices and customs are reversed. Its supplement, Erewhon Revisited (1901), dealt with the origin of religious belief. His musical compositions include two oratorios, gavottes, minuets, fugues, and a cantata. He is best known for his autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903.