[This entry was updated by John L. Cobbs (Kutztown University) from the entry by Joan DelFattore (University of Delaware) in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 212-227.]

John le Carré (pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell) is the author of realistic spy stories resembling those of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. His best-known novels are The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) and the George Smiley trilogy: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and Smiley's People (1980). Le Carré was born in Poole, Dorset, on 19 October 1931. His father, Ronald Thomas Archibald Cornwell, had left school at the age of fourteen and embarked upon a series of financial speculations which were often unsuccessful and occasionally illegal. As le Carré later remarked (Time, 3 October 1977), "He was like Gatsby. He lived in a contradictory world. There was always credit, but we never had any...