Challenging both capitalism and the values of Western civilization, the gay socialist writer Edward Carpenter had an extraordinary impact on the cultural and political landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A mystic advocate of, among other causes, free love, recycling, nudism, women's suffrage and prison reform, Carpenter's work anticipated the sexual revolution of the 1960s and placed him at the epicenter of the literary culture of his day.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this major new biography situates Carpenter's life and thought in relation to the social, aesthetic and intellectual movements of his day, and explores his friendships with figures such as Walt Whitman, Robert Graves, Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster, Isadora Duncan and Emma Goldman. Edward Carpenter paints a compelling portrait of a man described by contemporaries as a "weather-vane" for his times.