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.
