David Garnett (9 March 1892 – 17 February 1981) was an English writer and publisher. As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname "Bunny", by which he was known to friends and intimates all his life. Early life Garnett was born in Brighton, East Sussex, the only child of writer, critic and publisher Edward Garnett and his wife Constance Clara Black, a translator of Russian. His paternal grandfather and great-grandfather both worked at what is now the British Library, then within the British Museum. Encouraged by his father, he gained his first paid work at the age of eleven, drawing a map entitled "NEW SEA and the BEVIS COUNTRY", signed "D. G. fecit", to illustrate a new edition of Bevis, a boy's adventure story by Richard Jefferies. For this he received five shillings from the publisher Gerald Duckworth, for whom his father was a reader. He was then sent as a day boy to a prep school called Westerham, five miles from the Cearne, being expected to travel there daily on a scaled-down version of a Penny-farthing bicycle which had been owned by his uncle Arthur Garnett as a boy, wearing a beret. As a result of this, the other boys gave him the name "Onions". In 1905, Garnett’s mother moved into a rented flat in Hampstead, from where he began to attend University College School in Gower Street, London, travelling there daily by horse-drawn tram. In his time between school and university, Garnett befriended Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, then in Brixton Prison, and devised an unsuccessful attempt to spring him from the gaol. He spent July and August of 1910 in Germany, to learn the language, and then in October was admitted to the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, a department of Imperial College, London, to study zoology and botany, where he was taught by J. B. Farmer, Adam Sedgwick, and Clifford Dobell. As a conscientious objector in the First World War, Garnett worked on fruit farms in Suffolk and Sussex with his lover Duncan Grant. Work Needing money, in 1919 Garnett wrote a sensational novel called Dope Darling : A Story of Cocaine, set during the First World War, which tells the story of an affair between a young medical student and a night-club singer and drug addict called Claire Plowman. According to a biographer of Garnett, Claire bore