British writer, born in London in 1880, died in 1969.
After a Cambridge education, he worked as a colonial administrator in Ceylon (currently Sri Lanka).
After returning to England, he married Virginia Stephen. His first novel, The Village and the Jungle (still very readable), came out in 1913 followed by The Wise Virgins in 1914.
Politically, he leanead towards the left: he was against the involvement of Great Britain in WWI, and he joined the Socialist Fabian Society.
Together with his wife Virginia (Virginia Woolf, obviously), he founded the Hogarth Press in 1917. The Woolfs were the core of the Bloomsbury Group.
Woolf kept writing all his life: Socialism and Co-operation (1921), After the Deluge (1931), and Principia Politica (1953), and the autobiographical Sowing (1960), Growing (1961), Beginning Again (1964), Downhill all the Way (1966) and The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (1969).
Leonard Woolf, in a pattern interestingly similar to the Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes story, has been accused of having been a facilitator of his wife's death; or at least of not having done enough to prevent it.
From The Journey Not the Arrival Matters:
The psychology of September 1939 was terribly different from that of August 1914. People of my generation knew now exactly what war is - its positive horrors of death and destruction, wounds and pain and bereavement and brutality, but also its negative emphasis and desolation of personal and cosmic boredom, the feeling that one is endlessly waiting in a dirty, grey railway station waiting-room, with nothing to do but but wait endlessly for the next catastrophe. We knew the war and civilization in the modern world are incompatible at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Europe of 1933 was infinitely more barbarous and degraded than that of 1914 and 1919. In Russia for more than a decade there had ruled with absolute power a government, a political power, and a dictator who, on the basis of superhuman doctrinal imbecility, had murdered millions of their fellow Russians because they were peasants who were not so poor as the poorest peasants; the communists, being communists, were continually torturing and murdering their fellow communists on such grounds as they were either right deviationists or left diviationists.
In Italy there was established a government and dictator who, with a political doctrine purporting to be the exact opposite of Russian communism, produced, much less efficiently, exactly the same results of savage stupidity. In Germany the same phenomena had appeared as in Russia and Italy, but the barbarism of Hitler and the Nazis showed itself, in the years from 1933 to 1939 to be much nastier, more menacing, more insane than even the barbarism of Stalin and the communists.