[This entry was updated by Dean Baldwin (Pennsylvania State University--Erie) from the entry by Augustus M. Kolich (Pennsylvania State University) in DLB 15: British Novelists, 1930-1959, the entry by A. T. Tolley (Carleton University) in DLB 27: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 1945-1960, the entry by Baldwin in DLB 139: British Short Fiction Writers, 1945-1980, and the entry by Emily A. Hipchen (University of Georgia) in DLB 155: Twentieth-Century British Literary Biographers.]

John Wain achieved fame as a novelist, poet, critic, biographer, and short-story writer--in short, as a modern man of letters. Like his contemporaries Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and John Braine, Wain came of age just before World War II and published his first works in the years just following--a time when Britain was recovering from the devastation of the war and when young writers were reacting against the orthodoxies of modernism. Wain, though sometimes regarded primarily as a social...