An accomplished and original designer of textiles and furniture, books and typefaces, a socialist activist, poet and novelist (News from Nowhere), Morris (1834- 1896) had a "magpie mind" that sought expression in any number of media. MacCarthy (Eric Gill, a prize-winning biography of the sculptor), illuminates the paradoxes that shaped Morris's "painfully heroic progress through life." Morris was a manufacturer of lush housewares who rejected his father as a "capitalist villain"; an astringent critic of Victorian England who nearly became its poet laureate; a man both worldly and naive, stymied by his wife's affair with the charismatic Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Morris emerges in vivid snapshots as vital, protean and compassionate. This is the biography of a temperament?of a burgeoning reaction against late Victorian bourgeois complacency?that Morris shared with his friend painter Edward Burne-Jones, Rossetti, George Bernard Shaw and others. It also is shaped by interesting extended discussions?of the period's architecture, politics and literature?that sometimes distract from the account of the life they purportedly illuminate.