Davies was born in
Prescot,
Merseyside (then in
Lancashire), to a Methodist minister and his wife. He went to
Kingswood School,
Bath, and read the Classics and English Triposes at
St John's College, Cambridge, where he co-edited the student magazine
Experiment with
William Empson. Following graduation he was awarded both the Jebb Studentship and the Le Bas Essay Prize. In 1933 he was elected the first-ever fellow of English at St John's College, and three years later he was appointed a University Lecturer in the subject. While at Cambridge he was a member of the
Apostles and befriended the philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Davies spent some time in Paris during the 1930s, and in 1936 he was one of the organisers of the
London International Surrealist Exhibition, where he met the artist
Salvador Dalí. His poems were mostly published in
avant garde magazines and were not collected during his lifetime; his best known was arguably
Petron (1935). His novels include
Full Fathom Five (1956) and
The Papers of Andrew Melmoth (1960), while his works of literary scholarship include
Realism in the Drama (his prize-winning entry for the Le Bas competition; 1933),
Surrealism (1936), ''Macaulay's Marginalia to Lucretius
(1937) and Grammar Without Tears'' (1951). Politically Davies was of the left, and he intended to stand as the
Labour Party candidate for
Isle of Ely in the anticipated 1940 general election, but his prospective candidature was terminated when the party found out that he was also a member of the
Communist Party. During World War II he was employed at the
Ministry of Food, which gave him an insight into administrative problems; perhaps consequently, he lost much of his youthful utopianism, and in the 1950s renounced his communist affiliation and reverted to a more orthodox social democracy in its stead. ==Personal life==