SOURCE: "The Short Stories of Angus Wilson," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. III, No. 2, Winter, 1966, pp. 117-25.

An English man of letters, Bradbury is best known as the author of such satiric novels as Eating People Is Wrong (1959) and Stepping Westward (1965). He has also, as a literary critic, written extensively on English and American literature, especially the works of E. M. Forster. In this analysis, he discusses Wilson 's unusual mix of moral realism and absurd, grotesque characters.

Many of the critics who have commented on Angus Wilson's fiction appear to have seen him as a direct inheritor of a central tradition in English fiction—the socio-moral tradition, which concerns itself with the moral analysis of life in society. Seen in this light, Wilson is a writer who carries on the habitual concerns of storytellers from Jane Austen to Forster into the world of post-Second World War...