Increased attachment to religion
most immediately characterized literature after World
War II. This was particularly perceptible in authors who
had already established themselves before the war.
W.H.
Auden turned from Marxist politics to Christian
commitment, expressed in poems that attractively combine
classical form with vernacular relaxedness. Christian
belief suffused the verse plays of
T.S.
Eliot and
Christopher Fry. While Graham Greene continued the
powerful merging of thriller plots with studies of moral
and psychological ambiguity that he had developed
through the 1930s, his Roman Catholicism loomed
especially large in novels such as The Heart of the
Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951). Evelyn
Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and his Sword of
Honour trilogy (1965; published separately as Men at
Arms [1952], Officers and Gentlemen [1955], and
Unconditional Surrender [1961]) venerate Roman
Catholicism as the repository of values seen as under
threat from the advance of democracy. Less-traditional
spiritual solace was found in Eastern mysticism by
Aldous Huxley and
Christopher
Isherwood and by
Robert
Graves, who maintained an impressive output of taut,
graceful lyric poetry behind which lay the creed he
expressed in The White Goddess (1948), a matriarchal
mythology revering the female principle.
Fiction
The two most innovatory novelists to begin their careers
soon after World War II were also religious
believers—William Golding and Muriel Spark. In novels of
poetic compactness, they frequently return to the notion
of original sin—the idea that, in Golding’s words, “man
produces evil as a bee produces honey.” Concentrating on
small communities, Spark and Golding transfigure them
into microcosms. Allegory and symbol set wide resonances
quivering, so that short books make large statements. In
Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954),
schoolboys cast away on a Pacific island during a
nuclear war reenact humanity’s fall from grace as their
relationships degenerate from innocent camaraderie to
totalitarian butchery. In Spark’s satiric comedy,
similar assumptions and techniques are discernible. Her
best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961),
for example, makes events in a 1930s Edinburgh classroom
replicate in miniature the rise of fascism in Europe. In
form and atmosphere, Lord of the Flies has affinities
with
George Orwell’s examinations of totalitarian
nightmare, the fable Animal Farm (1945) and the novel
Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). Spark’s astringent
portrayal of behaviour in confined little worlds is
partly indebted to Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, who, from
the 1920s to the 1970s, produced a remarkable series of
fierce but decorous novels, written almost entirely in
mordantly witty dialogue, that dramatize tyranny and
power struggles in secluded late-Victorian households.
The stylized novels of Henry Green, such as
Concluding (1948) and Nothing (1950), also seem to be
precursors of the terse, compressed fiction that Spark
and Golding brought to such distinction. This kind of
fiction, it was argued by Iris Murdoch, a philosopher as
well as a novelist, ran antiliberal risks in its
preference for allegory, pattern, and symbol over the
social capaciousness and realistic rendition of
character at which the great 19th-century novels
excelled. Murdoch’s own fiction, typically engaged with
themes of goodness, authenticity, selfishness, and
altruism, oscillates between these two modes of writing.
A Severed Head (1961) is the most incisive and
entertaining of her elaborately artificial works; The
Bell (1958) best achieves the psychological and
emotional complexity she found so valuable in classic
19th-century fiction.
Christopher Fry
born December 18, 1907, Bristol,
Gloucestershire, England
died June 30, 2005, Chichester, West Sussex
British writer of verse plays.
Fry adopted his mother’s surname after he
became a schoolteacher at age 18, his father
having died many years earlier. He was an
actor, director, and writer of revues and
plays before he gained fame as a playwright
for The Lady’s Not for Burning (1948), an
ironic comedy set in medieval times whose
heroine is charged with being a witch. A
Phoenix Too Frequent (1946) retells a tale
from Petronius Arbiter. The Boy with a Cart
(1950), a story of St. Cuthman, is a legend
of miracles and faith in the style of the
mystery plays. A Sleep of Prisoners (1951)
and The Dark Is Light Enough (1954) explore
religious themes. After many years of
translating and adapting plays—including
Ring Round the Moon (produced 1950; adapted
from Jean Anouilh’s L’Invitation du
château), Duel of Angels (produced 1963;
adapted from Jean Giraudoux’s Pour Lucrèce),
and Peer Gynt (produced 1970; based on Johan
Fillinger’s translation of Henrik Ibsen’s
play)—Fry wrote A Yard of Sun, which was
produced in 1970.
Fry also collaborated on the screenplays
of the epic films Ben Hur (1959) and
Barabbas (1962), and he wrote plays for both
radio and television. His Can You Find Me: A
Family History was published in 1978.
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William Gerald Golding
in full Sir William Gerald Golding
born Sept. 19, 1911, St. Columb Minor,
near Newquay, Cornwall, Eng.
died June 19, 1993, Perranarworthal, near
Falmouth, Cornwall
English novelist who in 1983 won the Nobel
Prize for Literature for his parables of the
human condition. He attracted a cult of
followers, especially among the youth of the
post-World War II generation.
Educated at Marlborough Grammar School,
where his father taught, and at Brasenose
College, Oxford, Golding graduated in 1935.
After working in a settlement house and in
small theatre companies, he became a
schoolmaster at Bishop Wordsworth’s School,
Salisbury. He joined the Royal Navy in 1940,
took part in the action that saw the sinking
of the German battleship Bismarck, and
commanded a rocket-launching craft during
the invasion of France in 1944. After the
war he resumed teaching at Bishop
Wordsworth’s until 1961.
Golding’s first published novel was Lord
of the Flies (1954; film 1963 and 1990), the
story of a group of schoolboys isolated on a
coral island who revert to savagery. Its
imaginative and brutal depiction of the
rapid and inevitable dissolution of social
mores aroused widespread interest. The
Inheritors (1955), set in the last days of
Neanderthal man, is another story of the
essential violence and depravity of human
nature. The guilt-filled reflections of a
naval officer, his ship torpedoed, who faces
an agonizing death are the subject of
Pincher Martin (1956). Two other novels,
Free Fall (1959) and The Spire (1964), also
demonstrate Golding’s belief that “man
produces evil as a bee produces honey.”
Darkness Visible (1979) tells the story of a
boy horribly burned in the London blitz
during World War II. His later works include
Rites of Passage (1980), which won the
Booker McConnell Prize, and its sequels,
Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below
(1989). Golding was knighted in 1988.
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Muriel Spark
born
Feb. 1, 1918, Edinburgh, Scot.
died April 13, 2006, Florence, Italy
British writer best known for the satire and wit
with which the serious themes of her novels are
presented.
Spark was educated in Edinburgh and later spent
some years in Central Africa; the latter served
as the setting for her first volume of short
stories, The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories
(1958). She returned to Great Britain during
World War II and worked for the Foreign Office,
writing propaganda. She then served as general
secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of
The Poetry Review (1947–49). She later published
a series of critical biographies of literary
figures and editions of 19th-century letters,
including Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley (1951; rev. ed., Mary
Shelley, 1987), John Masefield (1953), and The
Brontë Letters (1954). Spark converted to Roman
Catholicism in 1954.
Until 1957 Spark published only criticism and
poetry. With the publication of The Comforters
(1957), however, her talent as a novelist—an
ability to create disturbing, compelling
characters and a disquieting sense of moral
ambiguity—was immediately evident. Her third
novel, Memento Mori (1959), was adapted for the
stage in 1964 and for television in 1992. Her
best-known novel is probably The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie (1961), which centres on a
domineering teacher at a girls’ school. It also
became popular in its stage (1966) and film
(1969) versions.
Some critics found Spark’s earlier novels minor;
some of these works—such as The Comforters,
Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960),
and The Girls of Slender Means (1963)—are
characterized by humorous and slightly
unsettling fantasy. The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
marked a departure toward weightier themes, and
the novels that followed—The Driver’s Seat
(1970, film 1974), Not to Disturb (1971), and
The Abbess of Crewe (1974)—have a distinctly
sinister tone. Among Spark’s later novels are
Territorial Rights (1979), A Far Cry from
Kensington (1988), Reality and Dreams (1996),
and The Finishing School (2004). Other works
include Collected Poems I (1967) and Collected
Stories (1967). Curriculum Vitae (1992) is an
autobiography. Spark was made Dame Commander of
the British Empire in 1993.
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Ivy Compton-Burnett
born , June 5, 1884, Pinner, Middlesex,
Eng.
died Aug. 27, 1969, London
English writer who developed a distinct form
of novel set almost entirely in dialogue to
dissect personal relationships in the
middle-class Edwardian household.
Compton-Burnett was born into the type of
large family she wrote about. She grew up in
Richmond, Surrey, and in Hove, Sussex,
studying at home until she went to Royal
Holloway College of the University of
London, where she graduated in 1906. At age
35 she met Margaret Jourdain, her lifelong
companion.
Pastors and Masters (1925),
Compton-Burnett’s second novel, was
published 14 years after her first, and it
introduced the style that was to make her
name. In this book the struggle for power,
which occupies so many of her characters, is
brought to light through clipped, precise
dialogue. She achieved her full stature with
Brothers and Sisters (1929), which is about
a willful woman who inadvertently marries
her half brother. Men and Wives (1931) has
at its centre another determined woman, one
whose tyranny drives her son to murder her.
Murder again appears in More Women Than Men
(1933), this time by a woman bent on keeping
her nephew under her domination. The tyrant
is a father in A House and Its Head (1935).
The range of her characterization is
considerable. It is the butler Bullivant who
is the most memorable of the cast of
Manservant and Maidservant (1947; also
published as Bullivant and the Lambs), while
the children in Two Worlds and Their Ways
(1949) are the most tellingly drawn. She was
created Dame of the British Empire in 1967.
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Iris Murdoch
original name in full Jean Iris
Murdoch, married name Mrs. John O. Bayley
born July 15, 1919, Dublin, Ireland
died February 8, 1999, Oxford, Oxfordshire,
England
British novelist and philosopher noted
for her psychological novels that contain
philosophical and comic elements.
After an early childhood spent in London,
Murdoch went to Badminton School, Bristol,
and from 1938 to 1942 studied at Somerville
College, Oxford. Between 1942 and 1944 she
worked in the British Treasury and then for
two years as an administrative officer with
the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration. In 1948 she was elected a
fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
Murdoch’s first published work was a
critical study, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist
(1953). This was followed by two novels,
Under the Net (1954) and The Flight from the
Enchanter (1956), that were admired for
their intelligence, wit, and high
seriousness. These qualities, along with a
rich comic sense and a gift for analyzing
the tensions and complexities in
sophisticated sexual relationships,
continued to distinguish her work. With what
is perhaps her finest book, The Bell (1958),
Murdoch began to attain wide recognition as
a novelist. She went on to a highly prolific
career with such novels as A Severed Head
(1961), The Red and the Green (1965), The
Nice and the Good (1968), The Black Prince
(1973), Henry and Cato (1976), The Sea, the
Sea (1978, Booker Prize), The Philosopher’s
Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985),
The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The
Message to the Planet (1989), and The Green
Knight (1993). Murdoch’s last novel,
Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), was not well
received; some critics attributed the
novel’s flaws to the Alzheimer’s disease
with which she had been diagnosed in 1994.
Murdoch’s husband, the novelist John Bayley,
chronicled her struggle with the disease in
his memoir, Elegy for Iris (1999).
Murdoch’s novels typically have
convoluted plots in which innumerable
characters representing different
philosophical positions undergo
kaleidoscopic changes in their relations
with each other. Realistic observations of
20th-century life among middle-class
professionals are interwoven with
extraordinary incidents that partake of the
macabre, the grotesque, and the wildly
comic. The novels illustrate Murdoch’s
conviction that although human beings think
they are free to exercise rational control
over their lives and behaviour, they are
actually at the mercy of the unconscious
mind, the determining effects of society at
large, and other, more inhuman, forces. In
addition to producing novels, Murdoch wrote
plays, verse, and works of philosophy and
literary criticism.
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While restricting themselves to socially limited
canvases, novelists such as Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth
Taylor, and Barbara Pym continued the tradition of
depicting emotional and psychological nuance that
Murdoch felt was dangerously neglected in
mid-20th-century novels. In contrast to their wry
comedies of sense and sensibility and to the packed
parables of Golding and Spark was yet another type of
fiction, produced by a group of writers who became known
as the Angry Young Men. From authors such as John
Braine, John Wain (also a notable poet), Alan Sillitoe,
Stan Barstow, and David Storey (also a significant
dramatist) came a spate of novels often ruggedly
autobiographical in origin and near documentary in
approach. The predominant subject of these books was
social mobility, usually from the northern working class
to the southern middle class. Social mobility was also
inspected, from an upper-class vantage point, in Anthony
Powell’s 12-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time
(1951–75), an attempt to apply the French novelist
Marcel Proust’s mix of irony, melancholy,
meditativeness, and social detail to a chronicle of
class and cultural shifts in England from World War I to
the 1960s. Satiric watchfulness of social change was
also the specialty of Kingsley Amis, whose deriding of
the reactionary and pompous in his first novel, Lucky
Jim (1954), led to his being labeled an Angry Young Man.
As Amis grew older, though, his irascibility vehemently
swiveled toward left-wing and progressive targets, and
he established himself as a Tory satirist in the vein of
Waugh or Powell. C.P. Snow’s earnest 11-novel sequence,
Strangers and Brothers (1940–70), about a man’s journey
from the provincial lower classes to London’s “corridors
of power,” had its admirers. But the most inspired
fictional cavalcade of social and cultural life in
20th-century Britain was Angus Wilson’s No Laughing
Matter (1967), a book that set a triumphant seal on his
progress from a writer of acidic short stories to a
major novelist whose work unites 19th-century breadth
and gusto with 20th-century formal versatility and
experiment.
Barbara Pym
born June 2, 1913, Oswestry, Shropshire,
Eng.
died Jan. 11, 1980, Oxford
English novelist, a recorder of post-World
War II upper middle-class life, whose
elegant and satiric comedies of manners are
marked by poignant observation and
psychological insight.
Pym was educated at Huyton College,
Liverpool, and at St. Hilda’s College,
Oxford. She worked for the International
African Institute in London from 1946 until
she retired in 1974 and edited the
anthropological journal Africa for more than
20 years. In her novels Pym rejected overt
drama and emotionalism and instead chose to
depict the quiet, uneventful surface of her
characters’ lives in order to describe human
loneliness and the corresponding impulse to
love. Her works include Some Tame Gazelle
(1950), Excellent Women (1952), A Glass of
Blessings (1958), Quartet in Autumn (1977),
and The Sweet Dove Died (1978). A Few Green
Leaves (1980) and An Unsuitable Attachment
(1982) were published posthumously, as was A
Very Private Eye (1984)—her diaries and
letters edited as an autobiography.
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John
Braine
born April 13, 1922, Bradford, Yorkshire,
Eng.
died Oct. 28, 1987, London
British novelist, one of the so-called Angry
Young Men, whose Room at the Top (1957; film
1958) typifies the concerns of a generation
of post-World War II British writers.
Braine attended St. Bede’s Grammar School in
Bradford and the Leeds School of
Librarianship and was working as a librarian
in the West Riding of Yorkshire when Room at
the Top appeared. Its protagonist, a young
working-class man, traps himself into an
unhappy marriage with the daughter of a
wealthy businessman. None of his later
novels approached it in critical or popular
success. Waiting for Sheila (1976) was
adapted for television (1977), as was Stay
With Me Till Morning (1970; adapted for
television, 1980).
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John Wain
born March 14, 1925, Stoke-on-Trent,
Staffordshire, Eng.
died May 24, 1994, Oxford, Oxfordshire
English novelist and poet whose early
works caused him, by their radical tone, to
be spoken of as one of the “Angry Young Men”
of the 1950s. He was also a critic and
playwright.
Wain was educated at St. John’s College,
Oxford, of which he subsequently became a
fellow. He was a lecturer in English
literature at the University of Reading from
1949 to 1955 and from 1973 to 1978 was
professor of poetry at Oxford.
His poetry includes Mixed Feelings
(1951), A Word Carved on a Sill (1956), Weep
Before God (1961), Wildtrack (1965), Letters
to Five Artists (1969), and Feng (1975).
Poems 1949–1979 was published in 1980. His
poetry, witty and brittle, has been
criticized for its occasionally contrived
cleverness.
Hurry On Down (1953) was Wain’s first
and, to some critics, best novel. (Other
contenders would probably be Strike the
Father Dead [1962] and A Winter in the Hills
[1970].) It follows the adventures of a
university graduate valiantly trying to
establish some sort of personal identity in
the bewildering and rapidly changing society
of postwar Britain. Wain’s other novels
include Living in the Present (1955), The
Contenders (1958), The Young Visitors
(1965), The Smaller Sky (1967), and The
Pardoner’s Tale (1978). His short stories
are collected in Nuncle and Other Stories
(1960), Death of the Hind Legs (1966), and
The Life Guard and Other Stories (1971).
Wain wrote a considerable body of literary
criticism, including Preliminary Essays
(1957), Essays on Literature and Ideas
(1963), and The Living World of Shakespeare
(1964; rev. ed., 1979). He wrote a biography
of Samuel Johnson (1974, with a revised
edition in 1980) and an autobiography,
Sprightly Running (1962). In 1983 he was
made a Companion of the Order of the British
Empire.
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Alan Sillitoe
born March 4, 1928, Nottingham,
Nottinghamshire, Eng.
died April 25, 2010, London
writer, one of the so-called Angry Young
Men, whose brash and angry accounts of
working-class life injected new vigour into
post-World War II British fiction.
The son of a tannery worker, Sillitoe
worked in factories from the age of 14. In
1946 he joined the air force, and for two
years he served as a radio operator in
Malaya. After his return to England, X-rays
revealed that he had contracted
tuberculosis, and he spent several months in
a hospital. Between 1952 and 1958 he lived
in France and Spain. In Majorca he met the
poet Robert Graves, who suggested that he
write about Nottingham, and Sillitoe began
work on his first published novel, Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning (1958; filmed
1960). It was an immediate success, telling
the story of a rude and amoral young
labourer for whom drink and sex on Saturday
night provide the only relief from the
oppression of the working life.
From his short-story collection The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
(1959), Sillitoe helped adapt the title
story into a film (1962). Later novels, such
as The Death of William Posters (1965) and
The Widower’s Son (1977), deal with more
intellectual working-class characters. In
2001 he published Birthday, a sequel to
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Notable
short-story collections are The Ragman’s
Daughter (1963; filmed 1974), Men, Women,
and Children (1974), and The Second Chance
(1980).
Sillitoe also wrote children’s books,
poetry, and plays while continuing as a
novelist. Life Without Armour, an
autobiography, was published in 1995.
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Stan Barstow
born June 28, 1928, Horbury, Yorkshire, Eng.
English novelist who achieved success with
his first book, A Kind of Loving (1960;
filmed 1962; stage play 1970).
Barstow grew up in a working-class
environment and worked in the engineering
industry until 1962. He was among a group of
young British writers (including Alan
Sillitoe, John Braine, and others) who
achieved immediate success in the 1950s and
’60s with their unsentimental depiction of
working-class life. His later novels include
Joby (1964), The Watchers on the Shore
(1966), A Raging Calm (1968), A Season with
Eros (1971), The Right True End (1976), A
Brother’s Tale (1980), and Just You Wait and
See (1986). He has also written short
stories and adapted several stories and
novels for radio and television. An
autobiography, In My Own Good Time, appeared
in 2001.
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David Storey
born July 13, 1933, Wakefield, Yorkshire,
Eng.
English novelist and playwright whose
brief professional rugby career and
lower-class background provided material for
the simple, powerful prose that won him
early recognition as an accomplished
storyteller and dramatist.
After completing his schooling at
Wakefield at age 17, Storey signed a 15-year
contract with the Leeds Rugby League Club;
he also won a scholarship to the Slade
School of Fine Art in London. When the
conflict between rugby and painting became
too great, he paid back three-quarters of
his signing-on fee, and Leeds let him go.
Storey’s first published novel, This
Sporting Life (1960), is his best-known. It
is the story of a professional rugby player
and his affair with his widowed landlady.
Storey wrote the script for a film based on
the novel and directed by Lindsay Anderson
in 1966. Other novels followed: Flight into
Camden (1960), about an independent young
woman who defies her mining family;
Radcliffe (1963), about the struggle for
power in a homosexual relationship; Pasmore
(1972), on the regeneration of a man who had
given himself up for lost; and Saville
(1976, Booker Prize), an autobiographical
account of the breaking away of a coal
miner’s son from village life. Later novels
include A Prodigal Child (1982), Present
Times (1984), A Serious Man (1998), As It
Happened (2002), and Thin-Ice Skater (2004).
Storey also established a reputation as a
playwright. His first play, The Restoration
of Arnold Middleton (performed 1966), won
immediate recognition. In Celebration
(performed 1969; filmed 1974), directed by
Anderson, returned to a recurring Storey
theme: the impossibility of making a clean
break with one’s lower-class roots and
background. Later plays include The
Contractor (performed 1969); Home (1970),
set in an insane asylum; The Changing Room
(1971), set in the changing room of a
semiprofessional rugby team; Life Class
(1974), about a failed art master; Mother’s
Day (1976); Sisters (1978); Early Days
(1980); and The March on Russia (1989).
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Anthony
Powell
born December 21, 1905, London,
England
died March 28, 2000, near Frome, Somerset
English novelist, best known for his
autobiographical and satiric 12-volume
series of novels, A Dance to the Music of
Time.
As a child, Powell lived wherever his
father, a regular officer in the Welsh
Regiment, was stationed. He attended Eton
College from 1919 to 1923 and Balliol
College, Oxford, from 1923 to 1926.
Thereafter he joined the London publishing
house of Duckworth, which published his
first novel, Afternoon Men (1931). The book
was followed by four more novels on prewar
society, including Venusburg (1932) and From
a View to a Death (1933).
Powell left publishing for journalism in
1936, writing for the Daily Telegraph for
nearly 50 years. After serving in World War
II, he wrote a biographical study of the
17th-century author John Aubrey and His
Friends (1948).
In 1951 he published A Question of
Upbringing, the first part of his ambitious
12-part cycle of novels. The series’
first-person narrative reflects Powell’s own
outlook and experiences; he observes and
describes English upper- and middle-class
society in the decades before and after
World War II with wit and insight, using a
subtle, low-key style. The 12-volume Dance
to the Music of Time series ended with the
publication of Hearing Secret Harmonies in
1975 and is considered a significant
achievement of 20th-century English fiction.
Powell afterward continued to write novels
and also four volumes of memoirs, collected
as To Keep the Ball Rolling (1983).
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Kingsley Amis
born April 16, 1922, London, England
died October 22, 1995, London
novelist, poet, critic, and teacher who
created in his first novel, Lucky Jim, a
comic figure that became a household word in
Great Britain in the 1950s.
Amis was educated at the City of London
School and at St. John’s College, Oxford
(B.A., 1949). His education was interrupted
during World War II by his service as a
lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals.
From 1949 to 1961 he taught at universities
in Wales, England, and the United States.
Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim (1954,
filmed 1957), was an immediate success and
remains his most popular work. Its
disgruntled antihero, a young university
instructor named Jim Dixon, epitomized a
newly important social group that had risen
by dint of scholarships from
lower-middle-class and working-class
backgrounds only to find the more
comfortable perches still occupied by the
well-born. Lucky Jim prompted critics to
group Amis with the Angry Young Men, who
expressed similar social discontent. Amis’s
next novel, That Uncertain Feeling (1955),
had a similar antihero. A visit to Portugal
resulted in the novel I Like It Here (1958),
while observations garnered from a teaching
stint in the United States were expressed in
the novel One Fat Englishman (1963).
Amis went on to write more than 40 books,
including some 20 novels, many volumes of
poetry, and several collections of essays.
His apparent lack of sympathy with his
characters and his sharply satirical
rendering of well-turned dialogue were
complemented by his own curmudgeonly public
persona. Notable among his later novels were
The Green Man (1969), Jake’s Thing (1978),
and The Old Devils (1986). As a poet, Amis
was a representative member of a group
sometimes called “The Movement,” whose poems
began appearing in 1956 in the anthology New
Lines. Poets belonging to this school wrote
understated and disciplined verse that
avoided experimentation and grandiose
themes. In 1990 Amis was knighted, and his
Memoirs were published in 1991. His son
Martin Amis also became a well-known
novelist.
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C.P. Snow
in full Charles Percy Snow, Baron
Snow Of The City Of Leicester
born Oct. 15, 1905, Leicester,
Leicestershire, Eng.
died July 1, 1980, London
British novelist, scientist, and
government administrator.
Snow was graduated from Leicester
University and earned a doctorate in physics
at the University of Cambridge, where, at
the age of 25, he became a fellow of
Christ’s College. After working at Cambridge
in molecular physics for some 20 years, he
became a university administrator, and, with
the outbreak of World War II, he became a
scientific adviser to the British
government. He was knighted in 1957 and made
a life peer in 1964. In 1950 he married the
British novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson.
In the 1930s Snow began the 11-volume
novel sequence collectively called
“Strangers and Brothers” (published
1940–70), about the academic, public, and
private life of an Englishman named Lewis
Eliot. The novels are a quiet (though not
dull) and meticulous analysis of
bureaucratic man and the corrupting
influence of power. Several of Snow’s novels
were adapted for the stage. Later novels
include In Their Wisdom (1974) and Coat of
Varnish (1979).
As both a literary man and a scientist,
Snow was particularly well equipped to write
a book about science and literature; The Two
Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
(1959) and its sequel, Second Look (1964),
constitute Snow’s most widely known—and
widely attacked—position. He argued that
practitioners of either of the two
disciplines know little, if anything, about
the other and that communication is
difficult, if not impossible, between them.
Snow thus called attention to a breach in
two of the major branches of Western
culture, a breach long noted but rarely
enunciated by a figure respected in both
fields. Snow acknowledged the emergence of a
third “culture” as well, the social sciences
and arts concerned with “how human beings
are living or have lived.” Many of Snow’s
writings on science and culture are found in
Public Affairs (1971). Trollope: His Life
and Art (1975) exemplifies Snow’s powers in
literary criticism, as does The Realists:
Eight Portraits (1979).
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Angus Wilson
born , Aug. 11, 1913, Bexhill,
East Sussex, Eng.
died May 31, 1991, Bury St. Edmunds,
Suffolk, Eng.
British writer whose fiction—sometimes
serious, sometimes richly satirical—portrays
conflicts in contemporary English social and
intellectual life.
Wilson was the youngest of six sons born
to an upper-middle-class family who lived a
shabby-genteel existence in small hotels and
boarding houses, chiefly in London. This
unsettled world on the fringe of society is
featured in many of his short stories, and
he describes it in his autobiographical Wild
Garden (1963). He was educated at
Westminster School, London, and Merton
College, Oxford, and then worked as a
cataloger at the British Museum Reading
Room. His mother died when he was 15 years
old, and he and his father developed a close
companionship that left an emotional void at
the latter’s death in 1939. A nervous
breakdown while working for the Foreign
Office during World War II led him to
conclude that he had kept himself in a state
of childlike innocence about the world and
that it was necessary to become an adult, no
matter how painfully. Several of the central
characters in his novels and stories are
also faced with this problem. He returned to
the British Museum after the war, becoming
deputy to the superintendent of the Reading
Room until he left in 1955 to devote himself
to writing. He was professor of English
literature at the University of East Anglia
(1966–78), becoming emeritus thereafter.
Death Dance: 25 Stories (1969) is a
collection of early stories. His first
novel, Hemlock and After (1952), is regarded
by some critics as his best. Before that he
had already been noticed by the reading
public with the stories collected as The
Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos
(1950). Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) and The
Old Men at the Zoo (1961) offer acute
pictures of a wide array of characters,
chiefly learned or propertied, in British
life. The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot (1958) is
a psychological portrait. Later novels
include Late Call (1964), As If By Magic
(1973), and Setting the World on Fire
(1980). The World of Charles Dickens (1970)
and The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling
(1977) are notable biographies. Wilson was
knighted in 1980.
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The parody and pastiche that Wilson brilliantly
deploys in No Laughing Matter and the book’s fascination
with the sources and resources of creativity constitute
a rich, imaginative response to what had become a mood
of growing self-consciousness in fiction. Thoughtfulness
about the form of the novel and relationships between
past and present fiction showed itself most
stimulatingly in the works—generally campus novels—of
the academically based novelists Malcolm Bradbury and
David Lodge.
From the late 1960s onward, the outstanding trend in
fiction was enthrallment with empire. The first phase of
this focused on imperial disillusion and dissolution. In
his vast, detailed Raj Quartet (The Jewel in the Crown
[1966], The Day of the Scorpion [1968], The Towers of
Silence [1971], and A Division of the Spoils [1975]), Paul Scott charted the last years of the British in
India; he followed it with Staying On (1977), a poignant
comedy about those who remained after independence.
Three half-satiric, half-elegiac novels by J.G. Farrell
(Troubles [1970], The Siege of Krishnapur [1973], and
The Singapore Grip [1978]) likewise spotlighted imperial
discomfiture. Then, in the 1980s, postcolonial voices
made themselves audible. Salman Rushdie’s crowded comic
saga about the generation born as Indian independence
dawned, Midnight’s Children (1981), boisterously mingles
material from Eastern fable, Hindu myth, Islamic lore,
Bombay cinema, cartoon strips, advertising billboards,
and Latin American magic realism. (Such eclecticism,
sometimes called “postmodern,” also showed itself in
other kinds of fiction in the 1980s.
Julian Barnes’s
A
History of the World in 101/2 Chapters [1989], for
example, inventively mixes fact and fantasy, reportage,
art criticism, autobiography, parable, and pastiche in
its working of fictional variations on the Noah’s Ark
myth.) For Rushdie, as Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses
(1988), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), and The Ground
Beneath Her Feet (1999) further demonstrate, stylistic miscellaneousness—a way of writing that exhibits the
vitalizing effects of cultural cross-fertilization—is
especially suited to conveying postcolonial experience.
(The Satanic Verses was understood differently in the
Islamic world, to the extent that the Iranian leader
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa, in
effect a death sentence [later suspended], on Rushdie.)
However, not all postcolonial authors followed Rushdie’s
example.
Malcolm Bradbury
born September 7, 1932,
Sheffield, England
died November 27, 2000, Norwich, Norfolk
British novelist and critic who is best
known for The History Man (1975), a
satirical look at academic life.
Bradbury studied at the University of
Leicester (B.A., 1953), Queen Mary College
(M.A., 1955) in London, and the University
of Manchester, from which he received his
doctorate in 1964. After traveling in the
United States on a fellowship, he taught
from 1959, first at the University of Hull,
then at Birmingham. In 1965 he joined the
faculty of the University of East Anglia,
where he was a lecturer, reader, and then
professor of American studies before
retiring in 1995. In 1970 he helped found
the university’s first creative writing
course and became noted for encouraging new
talent. Among the students he taught were
Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Bradbury received critical acclaim for
his first novel, Eating People Is Wrong
(1959), which takes place in the provincial
world of academics, a common setting for his
novels. Less successful was Stepping
Westward (1965), which leans heavily on his
experience on an American university campus.
Beginning with The History Man, Bradbury’s
works became more technically innovative as
well as harsher in tone. His later novels
include Rates of Exchange (1983), the
satiric tale of a linguist traveling to a
fictional eastern European country; Why Come
to Slaka? (1986), a guidebook to that
fictional country; Cuts (1987); and Doctor
Criminale (1992). His last novel, To the
Hermitage, appeared in 2000. Bradbury also
wrote several books and essays of criticism
and literary history, as well as a number of
television plays. He was appointed CBE in
1991 and was knighted in 2000.
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David Lodge
born Jan. 28, 1935, London, Eng.
English novelist, literary critic, and
editor known chiefly for his satiric novels
about academic life.
Lodge was educated at University College,
London (B.A., 1955; M.A., 1959), and at the
University of Birmingham (Ph.D., 1967). His
early novels, known mostly in England,
include The Picturegoers (1960), about a
group of Roman Catholics living in London;
Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962), Lodge’s
novelistic response to his army service in
the mid-1950s; The British Museum Is Falling
Down (1965), which uses
stream-of-consciousness technique; and Out
of the Shelter (1970), an autobiographical
coming-of-age novel. How Far Can You Go?
(1980; also published as Souls & Bodies) was
well received in both the United States and
Britain and takes a satiric look at a group
of contemporary English Catholics.
Several of Lodge’s novels satirize
academic life and share the same setting and
recurring characters; these include Changing
Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small
World: An Academic Romance (1984), and Nice
Work (1988). The latter two were
short-listed for the Booker Prize. Among his
later novels are Paradise News (1991),
Therapy (1995), Thinks… (2001), Author,
Author (2004), and Deaf Sentence (2008).
In addition to writing fiction, Lodge
coauthored the plays Between These Four
Walls (produced 1963) and Slap in the Middle
(produced 1965). His works of literary
theory include Language of Fiction (1966),
The Novelist at the Crossroads, and Other
Essays on Fiction and Criticism (1971; rev.
ed. 1984), Working with Structuralism:
Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century Literature (1981), Write
On: Occasional Essays (1986), and After
Bakhtin: Essays in Fiction and Criticism
(1990). The Art of Fiction (1992) reprints
essays from Lodge’s column written for The
Washington Post and the London Independent,
and The Practice of Writing (1996) contains
essays, lectures, reviews, and a diary. He
was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et
des Lettres in 1997 and a Commander of the
Order of the British Empire in 1998.
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Paul Scott
born March 25, 1920, Palmers Green, Eng.
died March 1, 1978, London
British novelist known for his
chronicling of the decline of the British
occupation of India, most fully realized in
his series of novels known as The Raj
Quartet (filmed for television as The Jewel
in the Crown in 1984).
Scott left school at 16 to train as an
accountant. He joined the British army in
1940 and was sent to India. From 1943 to
1946 he served with the Indian army, during
which time he traveled throughout India,
Burma (now Myanmar), and Malaya. Upon
returning to London he worked in a small
publishing firm for four years and then
became a director of a London literary
agency; he resigned in 1960 to write
full-time. A trip to India in 1964,
underwritten by his publishers, helped
inspire The Raj Quartet—The Jewel in the
Crown (1966), The Day of the Scorpion
(1968), The Towers of Silence (1971), and A
Division of the Spoils (1975)—as well as
Staying On (1977), which won the Booker
Prize. While exploring the manifold
consequences of the rape of an Englishwoman,
the books illustrate in profuse detail the
final years of the British occupation of
India from the points of view of English,
Hindu, and Muslim characters.
All of Scott’s works employ Indian themes
or characters, even those set outside India.
His early novels, such as Johnnie Sahib
(1952), The Mark of the Warrior (1958), and
The Chinese Love Pavilion (1960; U.S. title,
The Love Pavilion), address moral conflicts
of British army officers in the East.
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J.G. Farrell
born Jan. 23, 1935, Liverpool, Eng.
died Aug. 12, 1979, Bantry Bay, Ire.
British novelist who won acclaim for his
Empire trilogy, a series of historical
novels that intricately explore British
imperialism and its decline.
Farrell was born to an Irish mother and
an English father, and he spent much of his
childhood in Ireland. After attending
boarding school in Lancashire, Eng., he
studied at the University of Oxford, where
in 1960 he received a degree in French and
Spanish. While teaching at a lycée
(secondary school) in France, Farrell
started to write fiction. His debut novel, A
Man from Elsewhere (1963), a cerebral
narrative about a communist journalist
attempting to expose a celebrated writer’s
past, contains echoes of French
existentialism. He followed it with The Lung
(1965), in which he drew upon his own
affliction with polio, which he contracted
at Oxford, to present a downbeat portrait of
an irascible man confined to an iron lung.
On the strength of these two works, in 1966
Farrell won a fellowship to travel to the
United States. While in New York City he
published A Girl in the Head (1967), which
tells in seriocomic fashion the story of a
cynical eccentric living in an English
seaside town.
While Farrell received a modicum of
praise for these tales of contemporary
alienation, it was only after he turned his
attention to historical fiction that he
achieved wide renown. Becoming interested in
the collapse of the British Empire as a
cultural watershed, he embarked upon what
would eventually become a trilogy of
meticulously researched novels on the
subject. The first, Troubles (1970), focuses
on the struggle for Irish independence in
the years following World War I, with its
principal setting—the sprawling, run-down
Majestic Hotel—serving as a metaphor for the
dying empire. Though a rule change made the
novel (and all others published in 1970)
ineligible at the time for the Booker Prize,
in 2010 it received the Lost Man Booker
Prize, an honour (chosen by means of an
online public poll) meant to correct the
anomaly. In 1973, after spending time in
India, Farrell produced The Siege of
Krishnapur, a fictional treatment of the
1857–58 Indian Mutiny that blends a lively
adventure narrative with an unmistakable
critique of British Victorian values.
Esteemed by critics, it won the Booker
Prize. The Singapore Grip (1978), the final
novel in the series, ambitiously recounts
through both personal and political lenses
the Battle of Singapore during World War II,
in which the British colony fell to the
Japanese.
In 1979 Farrell drowned while fishing
near his home in Ireland. An unfinished
novel, The Hill Station, another examination
of British colonialism in India, was
published two years later.
John M. Cunningham
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Julian Barnes
born Jan. 19, 1946, Leicester, Eng.
British television critic and author of
inventive and intellectual novels about
obsessed characters curious about the past.
Barnes attended Magdalen College, Oxford
(B.A., 1968), and began contributing reviews
to the Times Literary Supplement in the
1970s while publishing thrillers under his
Kavanagh pseudonym. These books—which
include Duffy (1980), Fiddle City (1981),
Putting the Boot In (1985), and Going to the
Dogs (1987)—feature a man named Duffy, a
bisexual ex-cop turned private detective.
The first novel published under Barnes’s
own name was the coming-of-age story
Metroland (1980). Jealous obsession moves
the protagonist of Before She Met Me (1982)
to scrutinize his new wife’s past.
Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is a humorous
mixture of biography, fiction, and literary
criticism as a scholar becomes obsessed with
Flaubert and with the stuffed parrot that
Flaubert used as inspiration in writing the
short story “Un Coeur simple.” Barnes’s
later novels include A History of the World
in 101/2 Chapters (1989), Talking It Over
(1991), The Porcupine (1992), and Cross
Channel (1996). In the satirical England,
England (1998), Barnes skewers modern
England in his portrayal of a theme park on
the Isle of Wight, complete with the royal
family, the Tower of London, Robin Hood, and
pubs. Critics thought Barnes showed a new
depth of emotion in The Lemon Table (2004),
a collection of short stories in which most
of the characters are consumed by thoughts
of death. He explored why some people are
remembered after their death and others are
not in the historical novel Arthur & George
(2006), in which one of the title characters
is based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Barnes’s nonfiction work includes a
collection of essays about France and French
culture, Something to Declare (2002), as
well as The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003),
which explores his love of food. His memoir
Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) is an
honest, oftentimes jarringly critical look
at his relationship with his parents and
older brother.
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Salman Rushdie
in full Ahmed Salman Rushdie
born June 19, 1947, Bombay, India
Anglo-Indian novelist who was condemned
to death by leading Iranian Muslim clerics
in 1989 for allegedly having blasphemed
Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses. His
case became the focus of an international
controversy.
Rushdie was the son of a prosperous
Muslim businessman in India. He was educated
at Rugby School and the University of
Cambridge, receiving an M.A. degree in
history in 1968. Throughout most of the
1970s he worked in London as an advertising
copywriter, and his first published novel,
Grimus, appeared in 1975. His next novel,
Midnight’s Children (1981), an allegory
about modern India, was an unexpected
critical and popular success that won him
international recognition. Like Rushdie’s
subsequent fiction, Midnight’s Children is
an allegorical fable that examines
historical and philosophical issues by means
of surreal characters, brooding humour, and
an effusive and melodramatic prose style.
The novel Shame (1983), based on
contemporary politics in Pakistan, was also
popular, but Rushdie’s fourth novel, The
Satanic Verses, encountered a different
reception. Some of the adventures in this
book depict a character modeled on the
Prophet Muhammad and portray both him and
his transcription of the Qurʾān in a manner
that, after the novel’s publication in the
summer of 1988, drew criticism from Muslim
community leaders in Britain, who denounced
the novel as blasphemous. Public
demonstrations against the book spread to
Pakistan in January 1989. On February 14 the
spiritual leader of revolutionary Iran,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, publicly
condemned the book and issued a fatwa (legal
opinion) against Rushdie; a bounty was
offered to anyone who would execute him. He
went into hiding under the protection of
Scotland Yard, and—although he occasionally
emerged unexpectedly, sometimes in other
countries—he was compelled to restrict his
movements. Despite the standing death
threat, Rushdie continued to write,
producing Imaginary Homelands (1991), a
collection of essays and criticism; the
children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of
Stories (1990); the short-story collection
East, West (1994); and the novel The Moor’s
Last Sigh (1995). In 1998, after nearly a
decade, the Iranian government announced it
would no longer seek to enforce its fatwa
against Rushdie.
Rushdie’s subsequent novels include The
Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Fury
(2001). Step Across This Line (2002) is a
collection of essays he wrote between 1992
and 2002 on subjects from the September 11
attacks to The Wizard of Oz. Shalimar the
Clown (2005), a novel set primarily in the
disputed Kashmir region of the Indian
subcontinent, examines the nature of
terrorism. The Enchantress of Florence
(2008) is based on a fictionalized account
of the Mughal emperor Akbar.
Rushdie received the Booker Prize in 1981
for Midnight’s Children. He subsequently won
the Booker of Bookers (1993) and the Best of
the Booker (2008). These special prizes were
voted on by the public in honour of the
prize’s 25th and 40th anniversaries,
respectively. Rushdie was knighted in 2007,
an honour criticized by the Iranian
government and Pakistan’s parliament.
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Widening social divides in 1980s Britain were also
registered in fiction, sometimes in works that
purposefully imitate the Victorian “Condition of
England” novel (the best is David Lodge’s elegant,
ironic Nice Work [1988]). The most thoroughgoing of such
“Two Nations” panoramas of an England cleft by regional
gulfs and gross inequities between rich and poor is Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way (1987). With less
documentary substantiality, Martin Amis’s novels, angled
somewhere between scabrous relish and satiric disgust,
offer prose that has the lurid energy of a strobe light
playing over vistas of urban sleaze, greed, and
debasement. Money (1984) is the most effectively focused
of his books.
Just as some postcolonial novelists used myth, magic,
and fable as a stylistic throwing-off of what they
considered the alien supremacy of Anglo-Saxon realistic
fiction, so numerous feminist novelists took to Gothic,
fairy tale, and fantasy as countereffects to the
“patriarchal discourse” of rationality, logic, and
linear narrative. The most gifted exponent of this kind
of writing, which sought immediate access to the realm
of the subconscious, was Angela Carter, whose exotic and
erotic imagination unrolled most eerily and
resplendently in her short-story collection The Bloody
Chamber and Other Stories (1979). Jeanette Winterson
also wrote in this vein. Having distinguished herself
earlier in a realistic mode, as did authors such as
Drabble and Pat Barker,
Doris Lessing published a
sequence of science fiction novels about issues of
gender and colonialism, Canopus in Argos—Archives
(1979–83).
Typically, though, fiction in the 1980s and ’90s was
not futuristic but retrospective. As the end of the
century approached, an urge to look back—at starting
points, previous eras, fictional prototypes—was widely
evident. The historical novel enjoyed an exceptional
heyday. One of its outstanding practitioners was Barry
Unsworth, the settings of whose works range from the
Ottoman Empire (Pascali’s Island [1980], The Rage of the
Vulture [1982]) to Venice in its imperial prime and its
decadence (Stone Virgin [1985]) and northern England in
the 14th century (Morality Play [1995]). Patrick O’Brian
attracted an ardent following with his series of
meticulously researched novels about naval life during
the Napoleonic era, a 20-book sequence starting with
Master and Commander (1969) and ending with Blue at the
Mizzen (1999). Beryl Bainbridge, who began her fiction
career as a writer of quirky black comedies about
northern provincial life, turned her attention to
Victorian and Edwardian misadventures: The Birthday Boys
(1991) retraces Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed
expedition to the South Pole; Every Man for Himself
(1996) accompanies the Titanic as it steamed toward
disaster; and Master Georgie (1998) revisits the Crimean
War.
Many novels juxtaposed a present-day narrative with
one set in the past. A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) did
so with particular intelligence. It also made extensive
use of period pastiche, another enthusiasm of novelists
toward the end of the 20th century. Adam Thorpe’s
striking first novel, Ulverton (1992), records the
300-year history of a fictional village in the styles of
different epochs. Golding’s veteran fiction career came
to a bravura conclusion with a trilogy whose story is
told by an early 19th-century narrator (To the Ends of
the Earth [1991]; published separately as Rites of
Passage [1980], Close Quarters [1987], and Fire Down
Below [1989]). In addition to the interest in remote and
recent history, a concern with tracing aftereffects
became dominatingly present in fiction. Most subtly and
powerfully exhibiting this, Ian McEwan—who came to
notice in the 1970s as an unnervingly emotionless
observer of contemporary decadence—grew into imaginative
maturity with novels set largely in Berlin in the 1950s
(The Innocent [1990]) and in Europe in 1946 (Black Dogs
[1992]). These novels’ scenes set in the 1990s are
haunted by what McEwan perceives as the continuing
repercussions of World War II. These repercussions are
also felt in Last Orders (1996), a masterpiece of quiet
authenticity by Graham Swift, a novelist who, since his
acclaimed Waterland (1983), showed himself to be acutely
responsive to the atmosphere of retrospect and of
concern with the consequences of the past that suffused
English fiction as the second millennium neared.
Margaret Drabble
born June 5, 1939, Sheffield, Yorkshire,
Eng.
English writer of novels that are
skillfully modulated variations on the theme
of a girl’s development toward maturity
through her experiences of love, marriage,
and motherhood.
Drabble began writing after leaving
Cambridge University. The central characters
of her novels, although widely different in
character and circumstance, are shown in
situations of tension and stress that are
the necessary conditions for their moral
growth. Drabble is concerned with the
individual’s attempt to define the self, but
she is also interested in social change. She
writes in the tradition of such authors as
George Eliot, Henry James, and Arnold
Bennett.
Drabble’s early novels include A Summer
Bird-Cage (1962), about a woman unsure of
her life’s direction after dropping out of
graduate school, and The Millstone (1965),
the story of a woman who eventually sees her
illegitimate child as both a burden and a
blessing. Drabble won the E.M. Forster Award
for The Needle’s Eye (1972), which explores
questions of religion and morality. Her
trilogy comprising The Radiant Way (1987), A
Natural Curiosity (1989), and The Gates of
Ivory (1991) follows the lives of three
women who met at Cambridge during the 1950s.
In The Peppered Moth (2000) Drabble detailed
four generations of mothers and daughters in
a Yorkshire family. The Sea Lady (2007)
traces the relationship of a man and woman
who met as children before either became
famous—he as a marine biologist and she as a
feminist—and ends with their reunion. In
addition to her novels, Drabble wrote
several books on the general subject of
literature, as well as journal articles and
screenplays. She also edited the Oxford
Companion to English Literature.
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Martin Amis
born Aug. 25, 1949, Oxford,
Oxfordshire, Eng.
English satirist known for his virtuoso
storytelling technique and his dark views of
contemporary English society.
As a youth, Amis, the son of the novelist
Kingsley Amis, thrived literarily on a
permissive home atmosphere and a “passionate
street life.” He graduated from Exeter
College, Oxford, in 1971 with first-class
honours in English and worked for several
years as an editor on such publications as
the Times Literary Supplement and the New
Statesman.
Amis’s first novel was The Rachel Papers
(1973), the tale of a young antihero
preoccupied with his health, his sex life,
and his efforts to get into Oxford. Other
novels include Other People (1981), London
Fields (1989), and Night Train (1998), as
well as Time’s Arrow (1991), which inverts
traditional narrative order to describe the
life of a Nazi war criminal from death to
birth. In Amis’s works, according to one
critic, “morality is nudged toward
bankruptcy by ‘market forces.’ ” His
short-story collection Einstein’s Monsters
(1987) finds stupidity and horror in a world
filled with nuclear weapons. The
forced-labour camps under Soviet leader
Joseph Stalin are the subject of both the
nonfiction Koba the Dread (2002) and the
novel House of Meetings (2006). In his novel
The Pregnant Widow (2010), Amis examined the
sexual revolution of the 1970s and its
repercussions on a group of friends who
lived through it.
Among Amis’s volumes of essays are The
Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America
(1986) and The War Against Cliché (2001),
both collections of journalism. Experience
(2000), an autobiography that often focuses
on his father, was acclaimed for an
emotional depth and profundity that some
reviewers had found lacking in his novels
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Angela Carter
born May 7, 1940, Eastbourne, Sussex,
Eng.
died Feb. 16, 1992, London
British author who reshaped motifs from
mythology, legends, and fairy tales in her
books, lending them a ghastly humour and
eroticism.
Carter rejected an Oxford education to
work as a journalist with the Croydon
Advertiser, but she later studied medieval
literature at the University of Bristol
(B.A., 1965). She had moderate success with
her novels Shadow Dance (1966; also
published as Honeybuzzard) and The Magic
Toyshop (1967; filmed 1986). Her other
novels include Several Perceptions (1968),
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve
(1977), and Wise Children (1991). Carter’s
fiction gained new popularity in the 1980s,
notably after the release of the motion
picture The Company of Wolves (1984), which
she cowrote; the film was based on a story
from The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection
of her adaptations of fairy tales. Her
interest in the macabre and the sensual was
reflected in The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise
in Cultural History (1979), a polemical
study of the female characters in the
writings of the marquis de Sade. She also
wrote radio plays, children’s books, and
essays.
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Jeanette Winterson
born Aug. 27, 1959, Manchester,
Eng.
British novelist noted for her quirky,
unconventional, and often comic novels.
Educated at St. Catherine’s College,
Oxford, Winterson held various jobs while
working on her writing. Her first novel,
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), won a
Whitbread Award as that year’s best first
novel. It concerns the relationship between
a young lesbian and her adoptive mother, a
religious fanatic. The Passion (1987), her
second work, is a picaresque historical
novel that chronicles the adventures of
Villanelle, an enslaved Venetian woman who
is rescued by Henri, a cook from Napoleon’s
army. Attempting to reach Venice, the two
travel through Russia in winter.
Winterson’s other novels include Sexing
the Cherry (1989); Written on the Body
(1992); Art and Lies (1994), about
dehumanization and the absence of love in
society; Gut Symmetries (1997); The
PowerBook (2000); Lighthousekeeping (2004),
an exploration of the nature of storytelling
told through the tale of an orphaned girl
sent to live in a Scottish lighthouse; and
The Stone Gods (2007), a foray into science
fiction. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and
Effrontery, which covers various topics such
as Gertrude Stein, modern literature, and
lesbianism, was published in 1995. Winterson
also produced a collection of short stories,
The World and Other Places (1998), and
screenplays for television. She was named an
Officer of the Order of the British Empire
in 2006.
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Beryl Bainbridge
born Nov. 21, 1934, Liverpool, Eng.
died July 2, 2010, London
English novelist known for her
psychologically astute portrayals of
lower-middle-class English life.
Bainbridge grew up in a small town near
Liverpool and began a theatrical career at
an early age. She acted in various repertory
theatres for many years before she published
her first novel. Her work often presents in
a comical yet macabre manner the
destructiveness latent in ordinary
situations. In A Weekend with Claud (1967),
an experimental novel, the titular hero is a
predatory, violent man. Another Part of the
Wood (1968) concerns a child’s death
resulting from adult neglect. Harriet Said
(1972) deals with two teenage girls who
seduce a man and murder his wife. Other
novels in this vein are The Bottle Factory
Outing (1974), Sweet William (1975), A Quiet
Life (1976), and Injury Time (1977). In
Young Adolf (1978), Bainbridge imagines a
visit Adolf Hitler might have paid to a
relative living in England before World War
I. Winter Garden (1980) is a mystery about
an English artist who disappears on a visit
to the Soviet Union. Subsequent novels
include An Awfully Big Adventure (1989;
filmed 1995), The Birthday Boys (1991),
Every Man for Himself (1996), Master Georgie
(1998), and According to Queeney (2001).
In addition to her fiction, Bainbridge
wrote several television plays, and she
published work that underscores what she
considered the cultural and ethical
disintegration of contemporary life. English
Journey; or, The Road to Milton Keynes
(1984), is a diary she kept in 1983 during
the filming of a television series for the
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). She
also published Front Row: Evenings at the
Theatre: Pieces from the Oldie (2005), a
collection of reviews and other writings on
theatre. Bainbridge was made Dame Commander
of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in
2000.
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A.S. Byatt
born Aug. 24, 1936, Sheffield, Eng.
English scholar, literary critic, and
novelist known for her erudite works whose
characters are often academics or artists
commenting on the intellectual process.
Byatt is the daughter of a judge and the
sister of novelist Margaret Drabble. She was
educated at the University of Cambridge,
Bryn Mawr College, and the University of
Oxford and then taught at University
College, London, from 1972 to 1983, when she
left to write full-time. Among her critical
works are Degrees of Freedom (1965), the
first full-length study of the British
writer Iris Murdoch.
Despite the publication of two novels,
The Shadow of a Sun (1964) and The Game
(1967), Byatt continued to be considered
mainly a scholar and a critic until the
publication of her highly acclaimed The
Virgin in the Garden (1978). The novel is a
complex story set in 1953, at the time of
the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It was
written as the first of a projected
tetralogy that would chronicle the lives of
three members of one family from the
coronation to 1980. The second volume of the
series, Still Life (1985), concentrates on
the art of painting, and it was followed by
Babel Tower (1995) and A Whistling Woman
(2002). Possession (1990; film 2002), not
part of the tetralogy, is part mystery and
part romance; in it Byatt developed two
related stories, one set in the 19th and one
in the 20th century. Considered a brilliant
example of postmodernist fiction, it was a
popular success and was awarded the Booker
Prize for 1990. The Biographer’s Tale (2000)
is an erudite and occasionally esoteric
literary mystery, and The Children’s Book
(2009), following the family of a beloved
children’s author, incorporates historical
figures into a sweeping
turn-of-the-20th-century tale. In addition
to her novels, Byatt wrote several
collections of short stories, including
Sugar and Other Stories (1987), The Matisse
Stories (1993), and Elementals: Stories of
Fire and Ice (1998); Passions of the Mind
(1991), a collection of essays; and Angels &
Insects (1991; film 1995), a pair of
novellas. She was made a Dame of the British
Empire in 1999.
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Ian McEwan
born June 21, 1948, Aldershot,
Eng.
British novelist, short-story writer, and
screenwriter whose restrained, refined prose
style accentuates the horror of his dark
humour and perverse subject matter.
McEwan graduated with honours from the
University of Sussex (B.A., 1970) and
studied under Malcolm Bradbury at the
University of East Anglia (M.A., 1971). He
earned renown for his first two short-story
collections, First Love, Last Rites (1975;
filmed 1997)—winner of a Somerset Maugham
Award for writers under age 35—and In
Between the Sheets (1978), both of which
feature a bizarre cast of grotesques in
disturbing tales of sexual aberrance, black
comedy, and macabre obsession. His first
novel, The Cement Garden (1978), traces the
incestuous decline of a family of orphaned
children. The Comfort of Strangers (1981;
filmed 1990) is a nightmarish novel about an
English couple in Venice.
In the 1980s, when McEwan began raising a
family, his novels became less insular and
sensationalistic and more devoted to family
dynamics and political intrigue: The Child
in Time (1987; winner of the Whitbread [now
Costa] Book Award) examines how a kidnapping
affects the parents; The Innocent (1990;
filmed 1993) concerns international
espionage during the Cold War; Black Dogs
(1992) tells the story of a husband and wife
who have lived apart since a honeymoon
incident made clear their essential moral
antipathy; The Daydreamer (1994) explores
the imaginary world of a creative
10-year-old boy. The novel Amsterdam (1998),
a social satire influenced by the early
works of Evelyn Waugh, won the Booker Prize
in 1998. Atonement (2001; filmed 2007)
traces over six decades the consequences of
a lie told in the 1930s. The influence of
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is
evident in Saturday (2005), a vivid
depiction of London on Feb. 15, 2003, a day
of mass demonstrations against the incipient
war in Iraq. On Chesil Beach (2007)
describes the awkwardness felt by two
virgins on their wedding night. Climate
change is the subject of McEwan’s satirical
novel Solar (2010).
McEwan also wrote for television, radio,
and film, including The Imitation Game
(1980), The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), Last
Day of Summer (1984), and The Good Son
(1993). Several of his screenplays were
adapted from his novels and short stories.
In addition, McEwan wrote librettos for a
pacifist oratorio, Or Shall We Die? (first
performed 1982; published and recorded
1983), and an opera, For You (first
performed and published 2008), both with
composer Michael Berkeley. In 2000 McEwan
was created C.B.E. (Commander of the British
Empire).
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Graham Swift
born May 4, 1949, London, Eng.
English novelist and short-story writer
whose subtly sophisticated psychological
fiction explores the effects of history,
especially family history, on contemporary
domestic life.
Swift grew up in South London and was
educated at Dulwich College, York
University, and Queens’ College, Cambridge
(B.A., 1970; M.A., 1975). His first novel,
The Sweet-Shop Owner (1980), juxtaposes the
final day of a shopkeeper’s life with
memories of his life as a whole. Shuttlecock
(1981) concerns a police archivist whose
work uncovers conflicting information about
his father’s mental illness and involvement
in World War II.
After the publication of Learning to
Swim, and Other Stories (1982), Swift
released what was then his most highly
regarded novel, Waterland (1983; filmed
1992). The story centres on a history
teacher who is obsessed with local history
and his family’s past. Swift’s other novels
include Out of This World (1988), a
metaphysical family saga, and Ever After
(1992), the story of a man preoccupied with
the life of a 19th-century scholar. His
subtle, beautifully written Last Orders
(1996) won the prestigious Booker Prize. In
2003 he published The Light of Day, which
explores a private investigator’s
relationship with a client convicted of
murdering her husband. Swift’s novel
Tomorrow (2007) returns to themes of the
family as a woman lies awake, thinking to
the following day when she must reveal a
long-suppressed, life-altering truth to her
twin children.
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Poetry
The last flickerings of New Apocalypse poetry—the
flamboyant, surreal, and rhetorical style favoured by
Dylan Thomas,
George Barker,
David Gascoyne, and Vernon
Watkins—died away soon after World War II. In its place
emerged what came to be known with characteristic
understatement as The Movement. Poets such as D.J.
Enright, Donald Davie, John Wain, Roy Fuller, Robert Conquest, and Elizabeth Jennings produced urbane,
formally disciplined verse in an antiromantic vein
characterized by irony, understatement, and a sardonic
refusal to strike attitudes or make grand claims for the
poet’s role. The preeminent practitioner of this style
was Philip Larkin, who had earlier displayed some of its
qualities in two novels: Jill (1946) and A Girl in
Winter (1947). In Larkin’s poetry (The Less Deceived
[1955], The Whitsun Weddings [1964], High Windows
[1974]), a melancholy sense of life’s limitations throbs
through lines of elegiac elegance. Suffused with acute
awareness of mortality and transience, Larkin’s poetry
is also finely responsive to natural beauty, vistas of
which open up even in poems darkened by fear of death or
sombre preoccupation with human solitude. John Betjeman,
poet laureate from 1972 to 1984, shared both Larkin’s
intense consciousness of mortality and his gracefully
versified nostalgia for 19th- and early 20th-century
life.
In contrast to the rueful traditionalism of their
work is the poetry of Ted Hughes, who succeeded Betjeman
as poet laureate (1984–98). In extraordinarily vigorous
verse, beginning with his first collection, The Hawk in
the Rain (1957), Hughes captured the ferocity, vitality,
and splendour of the natural world. In works such as
Crow (1970), he added a mythic dimension to his
fascination with savagery (a fascination also apparent
in the poetry Thom Gunn produced through the late 1950s
and ’60s). Much of Hughes’s poetry is rooted in his
experiences as a farmer in Yorkshire and Devon (as in
his collection Moortown [1979]). It also shows a deep
receptivity to the way the contemporary world is
underlain by strata of history. This realization, along
with strong regional roots, is something Hughes had in
common with a number of poets writing in the second half
of the 20th century. The work of Geoffrey Hill
(especially King Log [1968], Mercian Hymns [1971],
Tenebrae [1978], and The Triumph of Love [1998]) treats
Britain as a palimpsest whose superimposed layers of
history are uncovered in poems, which are sometimes
written in prose. Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966)
celebrates his native Northumbria. The dour poems of
R.S. Thomas commemorate a harsh rural Wales of remote
hill farms where gnarled, inbred celibates scratch a
subsistence from the thin soil.
George Barker
born Feb. 26, 1913, Loughton, Essex, Eng.
died Oct. 27, 1991, Itteringham, Norfolk
English poet mostly concerned with the
elemental forces of life. His first verses
were published in the 1930s, and he became
popular in the ’40s, about the same time as
the poet Dylan Thomas, who voiced similar
themes but whose reputation overshadowed
Barker’s.
Barker left school at 14 and worked at a
variety of jobs before his first
publications, the novel Alanna Autumnal and
Thirty Preliminary Poems, appeared in 1933.
He taught English literature in Japan, the
United States, and England from 1939 to
1974. Two of his important long poems are
Calamiterror (1937), which was inspired by
the Spanish Civil War, and The True
Confession of George Barker (1950; rev. ed.
1957). His poems include the moving “Sonnet
to My Mother.” His later poems include Villa
Stellar (1978) and Anno Domini (1983).
Barker’s Collected Poems was published in
1987
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D.J. Enright
born March 11, 1920, Leamington,
Warwickshire, England
died December 31, 2002, London
British poet, novelist, and teacher.
After receiving a master’s degree at the
University of Cambridge, Enright began a
prolonged period of academic wandering,
teaching English in Egypt (1947–50),
Birmingham, England (1950–53), Japan
(1953–56), Berlin (1956–57), Bangkok
(1957–59), and Singapore (1960–70); from
1975 to 1980 he was an honorary professor at
the University of Warwick. He was joint
editor of Encounter in London (1970–72).
Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor (1969)
tells of his years abroad.
Both Enright’s poetry (Selected Poems,
1969) and his novels (Academic Year, 1955;
Figures of Speech, 1965) reflect his life
abroad and are anti-sentimental, as is his
best-known collection of essays, Man Is an
Onion (1972). Later poetry is based on
literary works or themes, as Paradise
Illustrated (1975) and A Faust Book (1979).
He also wrote fiction for children, such as
Joke Shop (1976) and Wild Ghost Chase
(1978). He edited Poets of the 1950s (1955)
and The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse
1945–1980 (1980).
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Roy Fuller
born Feb. 11, 1912, Failsworth,
Lancashire, Eng.
died Sept. 27, 1991, London
British poet and novelist, best known for
his concise and observant verse chronicling
the daily routines of home and office.
Educated privately in Lancashire, Fuller
became a solicitor in 1934 and served in the
Royal Navy (1941–45) during World War II.
After the war he pursued a dual career as a
lawyer and a man of letters; he served as
assistant solicitor (1938–58) and then
solicitor (1958–69) for the Woolwich
Equitable Building Society, and he was
professor of poetry at the University of
Oxford from 1968 to 1973. He was made a
Commander of the Order of the British Empire
in 1970.
Fuller’s first volume of poetry appeared
in 1939. The poems published in The Middle
of a War (1942) and A Lost Season (1944)
chronicle his wartime service and show him
intensely concerned with the social and
political conditions of his time. Epitaphs
and Occasions (1949) satirized the postwar
world, but in Brutus’s Orchard (1957) and
Collected Poems, 1936–61 (1962), Fuller
adopted a more reflective tone and showed
greater interest in psychological and
philosophical subjects. A lucid and detached
tone persists in such later volumes as Buff
(1965), New Poems (1968), From the Joke Shop
(1975), and Available for Dreams (1989) as
the poet sardonically reflects on old age.
New and Collected Poems, 1934–84 (1985) is
an authoritative collection of his verse.
Available for Dreams (1989) and Last Poems
(1993) contain his last verse.
Fuller wrote several novels, including
Image of a Society (1956), which portrays
the personal and professional conflicts
within a building society (savings and loan
association); The Ruined Boys (1959); and My
Child, My Sister (1965). He also wrote crime
thrillers and juvenile fiction, and his
memoirs were published in four volumes from
1980 to 1991.
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Robert Conquest
George Robert Ackworth Conquest (born
July 15, 1917) is a British historian
who became a well-known writer and
researcher on the Soviet Union with the
publication in 1968 of The Great Terror,
an account of Stalin's purges of the
1930s.
Early career
Robert Conquest was born in Malvern,
Worcestershire, the son of an American
businessman and a Norwegian mother. His
father served in an ambulance unit with
the French Army in World War I, winning
a Croix de Guerre in 1916. Conquest was
educated at Winchester College, the
University of Grenoble, and Magdalen
College, Oxford, where he was an
exhibitioner in modern history and took
his bachelor's and master's degrees in
Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and
his doctorate in Soviet history.
In 1937, after his year studying at
the University of Grenoble and traveling
in Bulgaria, Conquest returned to Oxford
and joined the Communist Party. Fellow
members included Denis Healey and Philip
Toynbee.
When World War II broke out, Conquest
joined the Oxfordshire and
Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and
became an intelligence officer. In 1940,
he married Joan Watkins, with whom he
had two sons. In 1942, he was posted to
the School of Slavonic and East European
Studies, where he studied Bulgarian for
four months.
In 1944, Conquest was posted to
Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the
Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet
command. There, he met Tatiana
Mihailova, who later became his second
wife. At the end of the war, he was
transferred to the diplomatic service
and became the press officer at the
British embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria. He
witnessed the gradual rise of Soviet
communism in the country, becoming
completely disillusioned with communist
ideas in the process. He left Bulgaria
in 1948, helping Tatiana escape the new
regime. Back in London, he divorced his
first wife and married Tatiana. This
marriage later broke down when Tatiana
was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Conquest then joined the Foreign
Office's Information Research Department
(IRD), a unit created for the purpose of
combating communist influence and
actively promoting anti-communist ideas,
by fostering relationships with
journalists, trade unions and other
organizations. In 1956, Conquest left
the IRD and became a freelance writer
and historian. Some of his books were
partly distributed through Praeger
Press, a US company which published a
number of books at the request of the
CIA.[1] In 1962-63, he was literary
editor of The Spectator, but resigned
when he found it interfered with his
historical writing. His first books,
Power and Politics in the USSR and
Soviet Deportation of Nationalities,
were published in 1960. His other early
works on the Soviet Union included
Soviet Nationalities Policy in Practice,
Industrial Workers in the USSR, Justice
and the Legal System in the USSR and
Agricultural Workers in the USSR.
In addition to his scholarly work,
Conquest was a major figure in a
prominent literary movement in the UK
known as "The Movement", which included
Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. He also
published a science fiction novel and
the first of five anthologies of science
fiction he co-edited with Amis.
The Great Terror
In 1968, Conquest published what
became his best-known, The Great Terror:
Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, the
first comprehensive research of the
Great Purge, which took place in the
Soviet Union between 1934 and 1939. The
book was based mainly on information
which had been made public, either
officially or by individuals, during the
so-called "Khrushchev Thaw" in the
period 1956-64. It also drew on accounts
by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and
exiles dating back to the 1930s, and on
an analysis of official Soviet documents
such as the Soviet census.
The most important aspect of the book
was that it widened the understanding of
the purges beyond the previous narrow
focus on the "Moscow trials" of
disgraced Communist Party of the Soviet
Union leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin
and Grigory Zinoviev, who were executed
after summary show trials. The question
of why these leaders had pleaded guilty
and confessed to various crimes at the
trials had become a topic of discussion
for a number of western writers, and had
underlain books such as George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four and Arthur
Koestler's Darkness at Noon.
Conquest claimed that the trials and
executions of these former Communist
leaders were a minor detail of the
purges. By his estimates, Stalinist
famines and purges had led to the deaths
of 20 million people. Other accounts
have put the figures higher and lower;
for example, according to archival and
demographic evidence examined by Alec
Nove, there were 10-11 million excess
deaths in the 1930s, while according to
Norman Davies the number may approach 50
million for the whole Stalin period. In
the preface to the 40th anniversary
edition of The Great Terror, Conquest
states:
"Exact numbers may never be known
with complete certainty, but the total
of deaths caused by the whole range of
Soviet regime's terrors can hardly be
lower than some fifteen million."
Conquest criticized western
intellectuals for "blindness" with
respect to the Soviet Union, and argued
that Stalinism was a logical consequence
of Marxism-Leninism, rather than an
aberration from "true" communism.
Conquest refused to accept the assertion
made by Nikita Khrushchev, and supported
by many Western leftists, that Joseph
Stalin and his purges were an aberration
from the ideals of the "revolution" and
were contrary to the principles of
Leninism. Conquest argued that Stalinism
was a natural consequence of the system
established by Vladimir Lenin, although
he conceded that the personal character
traits of Stalin had brought about the
particular horrors of the late 1930s.
Neal Ascherson noted: "Everyone by then
could agree that Stalin was a very
wicked man and a very evil one, but we
still wanted to believe in Lenin; and
Conquest said that Lenin was just as bad
and that Stalin was simply carrying out
Lenin's programme."
Conquest accused figures such as
Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard
Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Duranty,
Sir Bernard Pares, Harold Laski, D. N.
Pritt, Theodore Dreiser and Romain
Rolland of being dupes of Stalin and
apologists for his regime for various
comments they had made denying,
excusing, or justifying various aspects
of the purges.
After the opening up of the Soviet
archives in 1991, detailed, unedited
information has been released that
contest Conquest's claims heavily.
Contested is the duration of sentences,
the "political" criteria for prisoners,
the ethnic makeup, and total the number
of prisoners, which has been revised
down to a more realistic number.
Later works
In 1986, Conquest published The
Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet
Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine,
dealing with the Holodomor, the famine
in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR
resulting from the collectivization of
agriculture under Stalin's direction in
1929-31, in which millions of peasants
died of starvation or through
deportation to labor camps.
In this book, Conquest was even more
critical of western left-wing
intellectuals than he had been in The
Great Terror. He accused them of denying
the full scale of the famine, attacking
their views as "an intellectual and
moral disgrace on a massive scale." He
later wrote that the western world had
been faced with two different stories
about the famine in the 1930s, and
accused many intellectuals of believing
the false one: "Why did an intellectual
stratum overwhelmingly choose to believe
the false one? None of this can be
accounted for in intellectual terms. To
accept information about a matter on
which totally contradictory evidence
exists, and in which investigation of
major disputes on the matter is
prevented, is not a rational act."
After the partial opening of the
Soviet archives in the later years of
the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, Conquest
was able to publish The Great Terror: A
Reassessment, a consideration of his
1968 book in the light of newly
available evidence.
One of Conquest's recent works was
Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999)
where he describes the attraction that
totalitarian systems of thought seem to
hold for many western intellectuals. He
traces this attitude back to the Age of
Reason and its culmination in the French
Revolution.
Later life
In 1962, Conquest was divorced from
his second wife and, in 1964, he married
Caroleen MacFarlane. This marriage was
dissolved in 1978 and, in 1979, he
married Elizabeth Neece Wingate, a
lecturer in English and the daughter of
a United States Air Force colonel. In
1981, Conquest moved to California to
take up a post at the Hoover Institution
at Stanford University.
Conquest is now senior research
fellow and scholar-curator of the
Russian and Commonwealth of Independent
States Collection at the Hoover
Institution. He is also an adjunct
fellow of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington,
D.C., and a former research associate of
Harvard University's Ukrainian Research
Institute. He is a member of the board
of the Institute for European Defence
and Strategic Studies. He is a fellow of
the British Interplanetary Society and a
member of the Society for the Promotion
of Roman Studies and the American
Association for the Advancement of
Slavic Studies.
Conquest has remained a British
citizen and, in 1996, he was made a
Companion of the Order of St Michael and
St George. His other awards and honors
include the Richard Weaver Award for
Scholarly Letters, the Alexis de
Tocqueville Award, and selection by the
National Endowment for the Humanities to
deliver the 1993 Jefferson Lecture in
the Humanities. In 1994 he was elected a
Fellow of the British Academy.Conquest
is also known as a poet. He has brought
out six volumes of poetry and one of
literary criticism, edited the seminal
New Lines anthologies, and published a
verse translation of Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn's Prussian Nights. He
received the American Academy of Arts
and Letters Award in 1997. He is a
fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature and the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences. He is a frequent
contributor to the New York Review of
Books, the Times Literary Supplement and
other journals.
In November 2005, Conquest was
awarded the Presidential Medal of
Freedom by George W. Bush. In June 2006,
he was awarded the Ukrainian
Presidential Medal of Yaroslav the Wise,
the highest honor bestowed by Ukraine,
in recognition of his scholarship on the
Holodomor (the Ukrainian Famine of
1932-1933).
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Elizabeth Jennings
born July 18, 1926, Boston, Lincolnshire,
England
died October 26, 2001, Bampton, Oxfordshire
English poet whose works relate intensely
personal matters in a plainspoken,
traditional, and objective style and whose
verse frequently reflects her devout Roman
Catholicism and her love of Italy.
Jennings was educated at Oxford High
School and St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Her
first pamphlet, Poems, appeared in 1953,
followed by A Way of Looking (1955), which
won her a Somerset Maugham Award and enabled
her to visit Italy. Song for a Birth or a
Death (1961) marked a new development, with
its confessional tone and more savage view
of love. Some of the best of her later poems
concern her nervous breakdown and its
aftermath, such as those collected in
Recoveries (1964) and The Mind Has Mountains
(1966). Other works include The Animals’
Arrival (1969), Lucidities (1970),
Relationships (1972), Extending the
Territory (1985), and Familiar Spirits
(1994). A translation, The Sonnets of
Michelangelo (1961), was revised in 1969.
She also published poetry for children. In
1992 Jennings was made a Commander of the
British Empire.
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Philip Larkin
born August 9, 1922, Coventry,
Warwickshire, England
died December 2, 1985, Kingston upon Hull
most representative and highly regarded
of the poets who gave expression to a
clipped, antiromantic sensibility prevalent
in English verse in the 1950s.
Larkin was educated at the University of
Oxford on a scholarship, an experience that
provided material for his first novel, Jill
(1946; rev. ed. 1964). (His first book of
poetry, The North Ship, was published at his
own expense in 1945.) Another novel, A Girl
in Winter, followed in 1947. He became well
known with The Less Deceived (1955), a
volume of verse the title of which suggests
Larkin’s reaction and that of other British
writers who then came into notice (e.g.,
Kingsley Amis and John Wain) against the
political enthusiasms of the 1930s and what
they saw as the emotional excesses of the
poetry of the ’40s. His own verse is not
without emotion, but it tends to be
understated.
Larkin became librarian at the University
of Hull in Yorkshire in 1955 and was jazz
critic for The Daily Telegraph (1961–71),
from which occupation were gleaned the
essays in All What Jazz: A Record Diary
1961–68 (1970). The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
and High Windows (1974) are his later
volumes of poetry. He edited the Oxford Book
of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973).
Required Writing (1982) is a collection of
miscellaneous essays.
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John Betjeman
born Aug. 28, 1906, London, Eng.
died May 19, 1984, Trebetherick, Cornwall
British poet known for his nostalgia for
the near past, his exact sense of place, and
his precise rendering of social nuance,
which made him widely read in England at a
time when much of what he wrote about was
rapidly vanishing. The poet, in
near-Tennysonian rhythms, satirized lightly
the promoters of empty and often destructive
“progress” and the foibles of his own
comfortable class. As an authority on
English architecture and topography, he did
much to popularize Victorian and Edwardian
building and to protect what remained of it
from destruction.
The son of a prosperous businessman,
Betjeman grew up in a London suburb, where
T.S. Eliot was one of his teachers. He later
studied at Marlborough College (a public
school) and Magdalen College, Oxford. The
years from early childhood until he left
Oxford were detailed in Summoned by Bells
(1960), blank verse interspersed with
lyrics.
Betjeman’s first book of verse, Mount
Zion, and his first book on architecture,
Ghastly Good Taste, appeared in 1933.
Churches, railway stations, and other
elements of a townscape figure largely in
both books. Four more volumes of poetry
appeared before the publication of Collected
Poems (1958). His later collections were
High and Low (1966), A Nip in the Air
(1974), Church Poems (1981), and Uncollected
Poems (1982). Betjemen’s celebration of the
more settled Britain of yesteryear seemed to
touch a responsive chord in a public that
was suffering the uprootedness of World War
II and its austere aftermath.
Betjeman’s prose works include several
guidebooks to English counties; First and
Last Loves (1952), essays on places and
buildings; The English Town in the Last
Hundred Years (1956); and English Churches
(1964; with Basil Clarke). He was knighted
in 1969, and in 1972 he succeeded C.
Day-Lewis as poet laureate of England.
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Ted Hughes
born Aug. 16, 1930, Mytholmroyd,
Yorkshire, Eng.
died Oct. 28, 1998, London
English poet whose most characteristic verse
is without sentimentality, emphasizing the
cunning and savagery of animal life in
harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines.
At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he found
folklore and anthropology of particular
interest, a concern that was reflected in a
number of his poems. In 1956 he married the
American poet Sylvia Plath. The couple moved
to the United States in 1957, the year that
his first volume of verse, The Hawk in the
Rain, was published. Other works soon
followed, including the highly praised
Lupercal (1960) and Selected Poems (1962,
with Thom Gunn, a poet whose work is
frequently associated with Hughes’s as
marking a new turn in English verse).
Hughes stopped writing poetry almost
completely for nearly three years following
Plath’s suicide in 1963 (the couple had
separated earlier), but thereafter he
published prolifically, with volumes of
poetry such as Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970),
Wolfwatching (1989), and New Selected Poems,
1957–1994 (1995). In his Birthday Letters
(1998), he addressed his relationship with
Plath after decades of silence.
Hughes wrote many books for children,
notably The Iron Man (1968; also published
as The Iron Giant; film 1999). Remains of
Elmet (1979), in which he recalled the world
of his childhood, is one of many
publications he created in collaboration
with photographers and artists. He
translated Georges Schehadé’s play The Story
of Vasco from the original French and shaped
it into a libretto. The resulting opera,
from which significant portions of his text
were cut, premiered in 1974. A play based on
Hughes’s original libretto was staged in
2009. His works also include an adaptation
of Seneca’s Oedipus (1968), nonfiction
(Winter Pollen, 1994), and translations. He
edited many collections of poetry, such as
The Rattle Bag (1982, with Seamus Heaney). A
collection of his correspondence, edited by
Christopher Reid, was released in 2007 as
Letters of Ted Hughes. In 1984 Hughes was
appointed Britain’s poet laureate.
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Thom Gunn
born August 29, 1929, Gravesend, Kent,
England
died April 25, 2004, San Francisco,
California, U.S.
English poet whose verse is notable for
its adroit, terse language and
counterculture themes.
The son of a successful London
journalist, Gunn attended University College
School in London and Trinity College in
Cambridge, where he received a B.A. (1953)
and M.A. (1958). In 1954 he moved to San
Francisco, California, to study at Stanford
University. He later taught at the
University of California at Berkeley.
Gunn’s first volume of verse was Fighting
Terms (1954; rev. ed. 1962). The Sense of
Movement (1957) won a Somerset Maugham
Award, which he used for travel in Italy.
“On the Move,” a celebration of
black-jacketed motorcyclists from that
volume, is one of his best-known poems. In
the late 1950s Gunn’s poetry became more
experimental. He published My Sad Captains
in 1961, and Selected Poems, which also
contains the work of his Cambridge
contemporary Ted Hughes, appeared in 1962.
Positives (1966) is a group of poems about
Londoners, with photographs by the poet’s
brother Ander Gunn. In the 1970s Gunn began
to explore themes of homosexuality and
drugs, and notable collections came to
include Moly (1971), Jack Straw’s Castle
(1976), and The Man with Night Sweats
(1992), which focuses on the AIDS epidemic.
Among his other works are Selected Poems
1950–1975 (1979), The Passages of Joy
(1982), and Boss Cupid (2000). The Occasion
of Poetry (1982) and Shelf Life (1993) are
collections of autobiographical and critical
essays. Gunn received numerous awards,
including a Guggenheim (1971) and MacArthur
(1993) fellowship.
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R.S. Thomas
born March 29, 1913, Cardiff, Glamorgan
[now in Cardiff], Wales
died September 25, 2000, Llanfairynghornwy,
Gwynedd
Welsh clergyman and poet whose lucid,
austere verse expresses an undeviating
affirmation of the values of the common man.
Thomas was educated in Wales at
University College at Bangor (1935) and
ordained in the Church of Wales (1936), in
which he held appointments in several
parishes. He published his first volume of
poetry in 1946 and gradually developed his
unadorned style with each new collection.
His early poems, most notably those found in
Stones of the Field (1946) and Song at the
Year’s Turning: Poems 1942–1954 (1955),
contained a harshly critical but
increasingly compassionate view of the Welsh
people and their stark homeland. In Thomas’s
later volumes, starting with Poetry for
Supper (1958), the subjects of his poetry
remained the same, yet his questions became
more specific, his irony more bitter, and
his compassion deeper. In such later works
as The Way of It (1977), Frequencies (1978),
Between Here and Now (1981), and Later Poems
1972–1982 (1983), Thomas was not without
hope when he described with mournful
derision the cultural decay affecting his
parishioners, his country, and the modern
world. Though an ardent Welsh nationalist,
Thomas learned to speak Welsh only in his
30s and did not feel comfortable writing
poetry in that tongue; however, Neb (1985;
“No One”; Eng. trans. Autobiographies), a
collection of autobiographical essays, was
written in Welsh. Thomas was awarded the
Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1964. His
Collected Poems 1945–1990 was published in
1993.
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Britain’s industrial regions received attention in
poetry too. In collections such as Terry Street (1969),
Douglas Dunn wrote of working-class life in northeastern
England. Tony Harrison, the most arresting English poet
to find his voice in the later decades of the 20th
century (The Loiners [1970], From the School of
Eloquence and Other Poems [1978], Continuous [1981]),
came, as he stresses, from a working-class community in
industrial Yorkshire. Harrison’s social and cultural
journey away from that world by means of a grammar
school education and a degree in classics provoked
responses in him that his poetry conveys with
imaginative vehemence and caustic wit: anger at the
deprivations and humiliations endured by the working
class; guilt over the way his talent had lifted him away
from these. Trenchantly combining colloquial ruggedness
with classic form, Harrison’s poetry—sometimes
innovatively written to accompany television films—kept
up a fiercely original and socially concerned commentary
on such themes as inner-city dereliction (V [1985]), the
horrors of warfare (The Gaze of the Gorgon [1992] and
The Shadow of Hiroshima [1995]), and the evils of
censorship (The Blasphemers’ Banquet [1989], a verse
film partly written in reaction to the fatwa on Salman
Rushdie for The Satanic Verses).
Also from Yorkshire was Blake Morrison, whose finest
work, The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper (1987), was
composed in taut, macabre stanzas thickened with
dialect. Morrison’s work also displayed a growing
development in late 20th-century British poetry: the
writing of narrative verse. Although there had been
earlier instances of this verse after 1945 (Betjeman’s
blank-verse autobiography Summoned by Bells [1960]
proved the most popular), it was in the 1980s and ’90s
that the form was given renewed prominence by poets such
as the Kipling-influenced James Fenton. An especially
ambitious exercise in the narrative genre was Craig
Raine’s History: The Home Movie (1994), a huge
semifictionalized saga, written in three-line stanzas,
chronicling several generations of his and his wife’s
families. Before this, three books of dazzling
virtuosity (The Onion, Memory [1978], A Martian Sends a
Postcard Home [1979], and Rich [1984]) established Raine
as the founder and most inventive exemplar of what came
to be called the Martian school of poetry. The defining
characteristic of this school was a poetry rife with
startling images, unexpected but audaciously apt
similes, and rapid, imaginative tricks of transformation
that set the reader looking at the world afresh.
The closing years of the 20th century witnessed a
remarkable last surge of creativity from Ted Hughes
(after his death in 1998, Andrew Motion, a writer of
more subdued and subfusc verses, became poet laureate).
In Birthday Letters (1998), Hughes published a poetic
chronicle of his much-speculated-upon relationship with
Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married
from 1956 until her suicide in 1963. With Tales from
Ovid (1997) and his versions of Aeschylus’s Oresteia
(1999) and Euripides’ Alcestis (1999), he looked back
even further. These works—part translation, part
transformation—magnificently reenergize classic texts
with Hughes’s own imaginative powers and preoccupations.
Heaney impressively effected a similar feat in his fine
translation of
Beowulf (1999).
Douglas Dunn
born Oct. 23, 1942, Inchinnan,
Renfrewshire, Scot.
Scottish writer and critic, best known
for his poems evoking working-class British
life.
Dunn left school at 17 to become a junior
library assistant. He worked at libraries in
Britain and the United States before
completing his higher education at the
University of Hull, England. In 1971 he left
his job as an assistant librarian at the
university to pursue his writing.
Dunn’s first book of poetry, Terry Street
(1969), was widely hailed for its evocation
of working-class Hull. Critics praised
Dunn’s dry humour and his ability to capture
the sordid with precision, free of
sentimentality. Backwaters and Night (both
1971), The Happier Life (1972), and Love or
Nothing (1974) were not as well received.
Barbarians (1979) is a highly political
volume that attacks the sovereignty of the
propertied class and Oxbridge intellectuals
while arguing for the robustness of
“barbarian” working-class culture. Although
most critics generally admired the work,
they had greater praise for St. Kilda’s
Parliament (1981), noting Dunn’s mastery of
blank verse and his treatment of Scottish
themes. Europa’s Lover (1982) is a long poem
celebrating the best of European values.
Dunn’s highly praised Elegies (1985)
contains moving, unflinching poems on the
death of his first wife in 1981. Northlight
(1988) marks Dunn’s return to social
subjects. In addition to several television
and radio plays, including Scotsmen by
Moonlight (1977), Dunn also published two
collections of short stories—Secret Villages
(1985) and Boyfriends and Girlfriends
(1995)—and edited a number of poetry
anthologies.
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Tony Harrison
born April 30, 1937, Leeds, West
Yorkshire, Eng.
English poet, translator, dramatist, and
filmmaker whose work expressed the tension
between his working-class background and the
formal sophistication of literary verse.
Harrison was educated at Leeds Grammar
School and received a degree in linguistics
from Leeds University, where he read the
Classics. He wrote for the National Theater
in London, the Metropolitan Opera in New
York, and British television, always writing
in verse. His first collection of poems,
Earthworks, was published in 1964, and he
drew acclaim with The Loiners (1970). He
traveled widely and continued to write
poetry while living in Europe, Africa, and
America.
From the School of Eloquence and Other
Poems (1976) features some of Harrison’s
most popular poems and illustrates the
enduring influence of his background—in
particular, his parents—as well as his
concern with poetry itself. Published in
1985, Harrison’s most famous poem, “v.”
(1985), was inspired by the discovery upon
his return to England of vandalism at his
parents’ graves. The poem alludes to Thomas
Gray’s “An Elegy Written in a Country Church
Yard” while addressing the effects of the
failure of the mining industry on the
culture of the British working class.
Harrison wrote, directed, and narrated
versions of his poems, including “v.” and
“The Shadow of Hiroshima,” for film and
television. In 1995 The Guardian newspaper
commissioned him to write poems from the
front line of the armed conflict in Bosnia.
The book The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other
Film/Poems won the 1996 Heinemann Award,
given by the Royal Society of Literature. In
1992 Harrison won the Whitbread Poetry Award
(now the Costa Book Award) for The Gaze of
the Gorgon.
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Andrew Motion
born October 26, 1952, London, England
British poet, biographer, and novelist,
especially noted for his narrative poetry,
who was poet laureate of England from 1999
to 2009.
Motion attended Radley College and
University College, Oxford (B.A., 1974;
M.Litt., 1977), where he was a student of
poet John Fuller. From 1976 to 1980 he
taught at the University of Hull and from
1995 at the University of East Anglia in
Norwich. In the interim between these
teaching positions, he was the editor of
Poetry Review (1980–83) and worked in a
variety of editorial capacities for two
London publishing houses.
Motion’s first verse collection, The
Pleasure Steamers, was published in 1978. It
contains “Inland,” which describes the fear
and helplessness of 17th-century villagers
who must abandon their homeland following a
devastating flood; the poem received the
Newdigate Prize in 1975. Noted for his
insight and empathy, Motion frequently wrote
about isolation and loss. Much influenced by
the poets Edward Thomas and Philip
Larkin—whose low-key poetic voices often
caused their work to be overlooked and
undervalued—Motion wrote critical works on
both men, The Poetry of Edward Thomas (1980)
and Philip Larkin (1982), as well as a
biography of Larkin (Philip Larkin: A
Writer’s Life, 1993). He also produced a
biography of poet John Keats (Keats, 1997)
and his biography of the talented Lambert
family, The Lamberts: George, Constant & Kit
(1986), earned him the Somerset Maugham
Award (established by Somerset Maugham to
enable writers under age 35 to travel to
“enrich their writing”) in 1987.
Motion’s later collections of poetry
include Secret Narratives (1983), Dangerous
Play: Poems, 1974–84 (1984), Natural Causes
(1987), Love in a Life (1991), The Price of
Everything (1994), Salt Water (1997), and
Public Property (2002). Among his works of
fiction are The Pale Companion (1989);
Famous for the Creatures (1991); Wainewright
the Poisoner (2000), a “fictional
confession” by 19th-century painter,
essayist, and alleged murderer Thomas
Griffiths Wainewright; and The Invention of
Dr. Cake (2003), a fictional biography of
the obscure poet-doctor William Tabor. In
2006 Motion published a memoir, In the
Blood, and in 2008 he released a collection
of essays titled Ways of Life: On Places,
Painters, and Poets.
As poet laureate, Motion sought to make
poetry accessible to a wider audience. He
especially targeted younger people,
encouraging schools to teach poetry
regularly. He was the first laureate to
serve a fixed, 10-year term; previous
laureates had received a lifetime
appointment. Motion was knighted in 2009.
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Sylvia Plath
born October 27, 1932, Boston,
Massachusetts, U.S.
died February 11, 1963, London, England
American poet and novelist whose
best-known works are preoccupied with
alienation, death, and self-destruction.
Plath published her first poem at age eight.
She entered and won many literary contests
and while still in high school sold her
first poem, to Seventeen magazine. She
entered Smith College on a scholarship in
1951 and was a cowinner of the Mademoiselle
magazine fiction contest in 1952. Despite
her remarkable artistic, academic, and
social success at Smith, Plath suffered from
severe depression and underwent a period of
psychiatric hospitalization. She graduated
from Smith with highest honours in 1955 and
went on to Newnham College in Cambridge,
England, on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1956
she married the English poet Ted Hughes. For
the following two years she was an
instructor in English at Smith College.
In 1960, shortly after Plath and her
husband returned to England, her first
collection of poems appeared as The
Colossus. Her second book, a strongly
autobiographical novel titled The Bell Jar,
was published in 1963 under the pseudonym
“Victoria Lucas.” The book describes the
mental breakdown, attempted suicide, and
eventual recovery of a young college girl.
During her last three years Plath
abandoned the restraints and conventions
that had bound much of her early work. She
wrote with great speed, producing poems of
stark self-revelation and confession. The
anxiety, confusion, and doubt that haunted
her were transmuted into verses of great
power and pathos borne on flashes of
incisive wit. In 1963, after a burst of
productivity, Plath took her own life. Ariel
(1965), a collection of her later poems,
helped spark the growth of something of a
cult devoted to Plath. The reissue of The
Bell Jar under her own name in 1966 and the
appearance of small collections of
previously unpublished poems, including
Crossing the Water (1971) and Winter Trees
(1971), were welcomed by critics and the
public alike. Johnny Panic and the Bible of
Dreams, a book of short stories and prose,
was published in 1977, and The Collected
Poems, which includes many previously
unpublished poems, appeared in 1981. Plath
had kept a journal for much of her life, and
in 2000 The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia
Plath, covering the years from 1950 to 1962,
was published. A biographical film of Plath
starring Gwyneth Paltrow (Sylvia) appeared
in 2003. In 2009 Plath’s radio play Three
Women (1962) was staged professionally for
the first time.
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