Career
His grotesque and subversive style was a precursor of surrealism. He illustrated an English edition of Voltaire"s Candide ((G Routledge, 1922), Mark Twain"s 1601: A Tudor Fireside Conversation, a salute to scatology and Elizabethan manners (London: Printed for Subscribers only, 1936), and The Mimiambs of Herondas. He also designed the dust jacket for James Hanley"s Ebb and Flow (London: John Lane, 1932), other Hanley novels for Lane, and Dorothy Richardson"s Backwater (1916).
He contributed to a number of periodicals such as The Gypsy, The Golden Hind (1922-1925), the United States Vanity Fair, The Studio, and the United Kingdom The Argosy.
Alan Odle"s brother was Edwin Vincent Odle (1890–1942), author of the minor science fiction classic The Clockwork Manitoba (1923), and Odle was a friend and correspondent of the writer Claude Houghton. The film director and Python Terry Gilliam is a connoisseur of his work.