# Stephen Potter

Stephen Meredith Potter (1 February 1900 – 2 December 1969) was a British author best known for his parodies of self-help books, and their film and television derivatives. After leaving school in the last months of the First World War he was commissioned as a junior officer in the British Army, but by the time he had completed his training the war was over and he was demobilised. He then studied English at Oxford, and after some false starts he spent his early working life as an academic, lecturing in English literature at Birkbeck College, part of the University of London, during which time he published several works on Samuel Taylor Coleridge.