Few contemporary British authors have had as much success writing in two genres as David Storey in fiction and drama. His first novel, This Sporting Life (1960), brought him the Macmillan Fiction Award, and his sixth novel, Saville (1976), elicited Britain's most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize for fiction. He has twice won the Evening Standard Drama Award for best play of the year in London and is the only playwright ever to have won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award three times. He has published nine novels, fifteen plays, and a large volume of poetry, but the vast majority of those works were created in the prolific first two decades of his career, and his rate of publication slowed considerably during the 1980s and 1990s.

His novels, usually written in terse, understated prose, are conventional, realistic works in the tradition of the English social novels. Nearly all...