In an era of great prose writers—although he did win the Newdigate Prize for Poetry at Oxford—John Ruskin (b. 1819–d. 1900) rises above his peers as a true polymath. Widely known as “the author of Modern Painters” by the time he was thirty, he would become a recognized authority not only on painting and architecture, following publication of The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–1853) but also on literature, history, and theology, all treated at length over the five volumes of Modern Painters (1843–1860). The pamphlets Pre-Raphaelitism (1851) and Academy Notes (1855–1859) placed him at the forefront of public controversy over modern art. Unto this Last, first published as essays in the Cornhill Magazine (1860) and then as a book (1862), was a bombshell explosion of laissez-faire capitalism, controversial and hugely influential for a generation before Marx’s writings were translated into English. From 1870, as the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, he lectured and wrote on an ever-increasing range of subjects, mostly on art but also encompassing botany (Proserpina), geology (Deucalion), and ornithology (Love’s Meinie). In Fors Clavigera, ninety-six self-proclaimed “Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain” issued between 1871 and 1884, he created an entirely new form of publication, prefiguring the age of the Internet, and in Praeterita (left unfinished in 1889), he wrote one of the most intriguing of autobiographies. A friend of, or correspondent with, eminent figures such as Carlyle, Browning, Rossetti, and Gladstone, at the time of his death in January 1900, he was the most widely read author of the age, and one of its greatest celebrities, even though he had been in retreat from public life for over a decade. Despite his reputation suffering some decline in a general reaction against Victorian sages in the early 20th century, interest revived after the war. Since the late 1960s, there has been hardly a book or art exhibition on a 19th-century subject in which Ruskin has not featured prominently. His writings have been translated into many languages, and there is a Ruskin Library in both England (Lancaster University) and Japan (Tokyo). Equally recognized as one of the finest prose writers in the English language and as a cultural commentator and social critic, Ruskin has proved capable of constant reinterpretation, most recently being lauded as a pioneer in matters of ecology and environmental concern.