On 18 December 1897 he married the writer Ada Radford. The following year, they had a daughter, May Wallas, who overcame diphtheria and flu to go to Newnham College, Cambridge, like her mother.[5] May was to publish editions of many of her father's works, including the 1940 collection Men and Ideas: Essays by Graham Wallas.[6][7]
Wallas became chair of the board's school management committee in 1897, and until he was defeated in 1907, the encouragement of educational reform and the raising of academic standards in state schools were some his main activities.[2]
He was appointed a university extension lecturer in 1890 and lectured at the newly founded London School of Economics from 1895. In 1898, he published a biography of the early-19th-century utilitarian radical Francis Place. His most important academic writings were Human Nature in Politics (1908) and its successors, Great Society (1914) and Our Social Heritage (1921).[2]
Ideas
Wallas argued in The Great Society: A Psychological Analysis (1914) that a social-psychological analysis could explain the problems created by the impact of the Industrial Revolution on modern society. He contrasted the role of nature and nurture in modern society, concluded that humanity must depend largely on the improvements in nurture and put his faith in the development of stronger international operation.
In The Art of Thought (1926), he drew on the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and Henri Poincaré to propose one of the first complete models of the creative process, as consisting of the four-stage process of preparation (or saturation), incubation, illumination, and verification),[8] which remains highly cited in scholarly works on creativity.[9]
