James Moore (Cornish author)
Cornish author, born 1929 (1929–2017)
James Harry Manson Moore (16 December 1929 – 11 May 2017) was a Cornish author. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and a leading authority on G. I. Gurdjieff.
Life and career
Moore was born in Saltash, Cornwall in December 1929. He was a leading authority on G. I. Gurdjieff, becoming active in practical and thematic Gurdjieff studies from 1956, after studying with Kenneth Walker and later with Henriette H. Lannes ("Madame Lannes") as his Gurdjieffian teacher and mentor between October 1957 and December 1978. His first major study, Gurdjieff and Mansfield (1980), examined the lives of Gurdjieff and the short story writer Katherine Mansfield. Moore's book challenged the persistent belief that Gurdjieff was somehow responsible when Mansfield, who arrived at Gurdjieff's institute in France suffering from terminal tuberculosis, died within a few months while still his guest.
From 1981 to 1994, Moore was responsible for gathering and leading new students in the Gurdjieff Society in London. He contributed to research for the 363-page Gurdjieff: an Annotated Bibliography (1985) compiled by J. Walter Driscoll and the Gurdjieff Foundation of California. During this period he was also a pupil of Henri Tracol and Maurice Desselle.
A confessed admirer of Gurdjieff and active Gurdjieffian for his entire adult life, Moore was the author of the biography Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth (1991).
“James Moore (Cornish author)” enters the record as cornish author, born 1929 (1929–2017). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what James, Moore and Cornish can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6139963. VIAF identifies the subject as 117861936. The Library of Congress control number is n80111518. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929, 2017, 1956 and 1957.
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This entry incorporates text from “James Moore (Cornish author)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.