The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
Hughes, Richard
1900–1976, English novelist. After graduating from Oxford in 1922, he helped found the Portmadoc Players and was for a time vice president of the Welsh National Theatre. In addition, he wrote several plays, notably The Sisters’ Tragedy (1922). Hughes was best known for his first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica (American ed., The Innocent Voyage, 1929), a bizarre tale about a group of children captured by pirates; the chilling unease of the story derives from the evil apparent, not in the pirates, but in the children. In Hazard (1938), Hughes’s next novel, was a sea story reminiscent of Conrad. The novels The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1972) remain tantalizing fragments of an uncompleted study of the inter-war years entitled The Human Predicament.
