Ronald Firbank

Another unsung literary hero of mine but one whose influence pervades all comic literature since the start of the Twentieth Century ,Ronald Firbank is one of the greatest of all comic stylists : redolent of Restoration Comedy and Oscar Wilde, and his influence clearly evident in the work of Evelyn Waugh and Joe Orton, his reputation remains intact as a writer to study for the sheer beauty and wit of his sentences alone. A post-modernist before the movement even existed, startlingly original and still sounding subversive and dangerous ! Treat yourself to one of his books…    

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Firbank

Ronald Firbank, in full Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank, (born January 17, 1886, London, England—died May 21, 1926, Rome, Italy), English novelist who was a literary innovator of some importance. Greatly indebted to the literature of the 1890s, his is a peculiarly fantastic and perverse, idiosyncratic humour. His wit largely depends upon the shape and cadence of the sentence and upon an eccentric and personal vocabulary. He influenced later novelists Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

A delicate child, Firbank was educated mainly privately, but he spent some two years at the University of Cambridge. Thereafter, he largely travelled for the sake of his health. He was painfully shy and had a habit of writhing his body and grasping his head. Firbank’s eccentricities, drinking, and witty remarks soon made him a well-known, even legendary, figure in London intellectual and bohemian life.

Firbank’s most notable novels are Vainglory (1915), Inclinations (1916), Caprice (1917), Valmouth (1919), The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), Sorrow in Sunlight (1924), and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926).