John Addington Symonds

John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) was an English historian, critic and poet. Educated at Oxford, he suffered from tuberculosis and from 1877 lived mainly at Davos in the Swiss Alps, where he wrote most of his work. His seven-volume Renaissance in Italy, published between 1875 and 1886, was the fullest English account of the period, and he also wrote lives of Shelley, Sidney, Ben Jonson, Michelangelo and Walt Whitman, translated the autobiography of Cellini and the sonnets of Michelangelo and Campanella, and published several collections of travel essays on Italy and Greece.