Born in England in 1901. He was the poetry editor for Time and Tide in the 1920s and 1930s. He moved to America in 1935, where he became a screenwriter for Hollywood. Today he is best known for His Monkey Wife (1930), a satirical novel about an explorer who marries a chimpanzee, as well as short stories which combine fantasy and black humor. One of these, "Green Thoughts", about a plant that eats people, is the source of the film Little Shop of Horrors. He died in 1980.