text: Stapledon was awarded a PhD degree in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1925 and used his doctoral thesis as the basis for his first published prose book, A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929). However, he soon turned to fiction in the hope of presenting his ideas to a wider public. The relative success of Last and First Men (1930) prompted him to become a full-time writer. He wrote a sequel, Last Men in London, and followed it up with many more books of both fiction and philosophy.
  For the duration of the Second World War Stapledon abandoned his pacifism and supported the war effort. In 1940 the Stapledon family built and moved into a new house on Simon's Field, in Caldy, in Wirral. During the war Stapledon became a public advocate of J.B. Priestley and Richard Acland's left-wing Common Wealth Party, as well as the British internationalist group Federal Union. He supported implementing the recommendations of the Beveridge Report and spoke at the first public meeting of the Left Book Club's "Readers' and Writers' Group".
  Some commentators have called Stapledon a Marxist, although Stapledon distanced himself from the label stating that - "I am not a Marxist, but I have learned much from Marxists, and I am not anti-Marxist", though he did refer to himself as a socialist.