Angus Wilson was the first prominent new English writer to emerge in the post--World War II era. In Critical Essays on Angus Wilson (1985) Malcolm Bradbury calls him "one of four or five great English post-war writers," placing him in the company of William Golding, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, and Iris Murdoch. Wilson is best known as a chronicler of the postwar social revolution in England and for his construction of a narrative mode that encompasses both the more successful experimentations of modernism and the strengths of the traditional novel of social realism. In his short fiction he portrays a world in flux--that of the 1930s to the 1950s, frequently looking back on these times with an ambivalent mixture of satire and pathos.

Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson was born in Dumfriesshire, England, on 11 August 1913 to William Johnstone-Wilson, who was of Scottish origin, and Maude Caney Johnstone-Wilson, who was from...