John Wain's first novel, Hurry on Down (1953), along with Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), seemed in the early 1950s to present a new type of hero--educated and impoverished, dissatisfied with conventional roles, suspicious of culture and all forms of pretense--working out his destiny in the provinces. These books broke the hegemony of the "sensitive," upper-middle-class, metropolitan novel. Wain has written a large number of novels and collections of stories, among them The Contenders (1958), Strike the Father Dead (1962), A Winter in the Hills (1970), The Pardoner's Tale (1978), and Young Shoulders (1982). His literary essays have been brought together in several collections, and he is the author of a celebrated biography, Samuel Johnson (1974). He has been the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award in 1958, the Heinemann Award in 1975, the James Tait Black Memorial Award in 1975, and the Whitbread Award for Fiction in 1983.

John Barrington Wain was born on 14 March 1925 at Stoke on Trent...