The Lives of the Novelists
The Lives
of the Novelists
A History of Fiction in 294 Lives
John Sutherland
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
The Seventeenth Century
1. John Bunyan
2. Aphra Behn
3. Daniel Defoe
4. Samuel Richardson
The Eighteenth Century
5. Henry Fielding
6. Samuel Johnson
7. John Cleland
8. Laurence Sterne
9. Oliver Goldsmith
10. Robert Bage
11. Olaudah Equiano
12. Fanny Burney
13. Susanna Haswell
14. Mrs Radcliffe
15. James Hogg
16. Charles Brockden Brown
17. Walter Scott
18. Jane Austen
19. M. G. Lewis
20. Mrs Frances Trollope
21. Thomas De Quincey
22. James Fenimore Cooper
23. John Polidori
24. Mary Shelley
25. Mrs Catherine Gore
The Nineteenth Century
26. Harriet Martineau
27. The Bulwer-Lyttons: Edward and Rosina
28. Benjamin Disraeli
29. Nathaniel Hawthorne
30. Harrison Ainsworth
31. Charles (James) Lever
32. J. H. Ingraham
33. Postscript: Prentiss Ingraham
34. Edgar Allan Poe
35. Mrs Gaskell
36. Fanny Fern
37. William Makepeace Thackeray
38. Charles Dickens
39. Mrs Henry Wood
40. Anthony Trollope
41. Grace Aguilar
42. The Brontës: Patrick, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, Anne
43. Maria Monk
44. George Eliot
45. Postscript: G. H. Lewes
46. Herman Melville
47. Mrs E. D. E. N. Southworth
48. Eliza Lynn Linton
49. Postscript: Beatrice Harraden
50. Sylvanus Cobb Jr
51. Charlotte Yonge
52. Wilkie Collins
53. R. M. Ballantyne
54. Mary J. Holmes
55. Dinah Craik
56. George Meredith
57. Mrs Oliphant
58. Horatio Alger Jr
59. George du Maurier
60. Postscript: Daphne du Maurier
61. Frank R. Stockton
62. ‘Walter’
63. Mrs Mary Braddon
64. Samuel Butler
65. Mark Twain
66. B. L. Farjeon
67. Ouida
68. Thomas Hardy
69. Ambrose Bierce
70. Lewis Wingfield
71. Henry James
72. Bram Stoker
73. Grant Allen
74. Richard Jefferies
75. Robert Louis Stevenson
76. Mrs Humphry Ward
77. Hall Caine
78. Sarah Grand
79. Marie Corelli
80. Lady Florence Dixie
81. Olive Schreiner
82. William Sharp
83. L. Frank Baum
84. H. Rider Haggard
85. Joseph Conrad
86. Ella Hepworth Dixon
87. Mary Cholmondeley
88. Arthur Conan Doyle
89. Postscript: John (Edmund) Gardner
90. Frank Danby
91. George Egerton
92. Kenneth Grahame
93. J. M. Barrie
94. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
95. Postscript: S. Weir Mitchell
96. Amanda Ros
97. Owen Wister
98. Amy Levy
99. Florence L. Barclay
100. O. Henry
101. Violet Hunt
102. Edith Wharton
103. W. J. Locke
104. Thomas Dixon
105. Israel Zangwill
106. M. P. Shiel
107. H. G. Wells
108. Arnold Bennett
109. John Oliver Hobbes
110. Norman Douglas
111. Booth Tarkington
112. Erskine Childers
113. Saki
114. B. M. Bower
115. Stephen Crane
116. Theodore Dreiser
117. Zane Grey
118. W. Somerset Maugham
119. John Buchan
120. Edgar Rice Burroughs
121. Sabatini
122. Edgar Wallace
123. Jack London
124. Rex Beach
125. Warwick Deeping
126. Jeffery Farnol
127. E. M. Forster
128. Mazo de la Roche
129. Daisy Ashford
130. Mary Webb
131. James Joyce
132. Virginia Woolf
133. Sax Rohmer
134. Edna Ferber
135. DuBose Heyward
136. D. H. Lawrence
137. H. Bedford-Jones
138. Vicki Baum
139. Raymond Chandler
140. Katherine Mansfield
141. Michael Sadleir
142. Sapper
143. Hervey Allen
144. Enid Bagnold
145. Erle Stanley Gardner
146. Agatha Christie
147. Richmal Crompton
148. Richard Aldington
149. Djuna Barnes
150. Max Brand
151. Pearl S. Buck
152. James M. Cain
153. Captain W. E. Johns
154. Phyllis Bentley
155. Dashiell Hammett
156. Postscript: Lillian Hellman
157. Aldous Huxley
158. J. B. Priestley
159. Henry Williamson
160. Louis Bromfield
161. Peter Cheyney
162. Scott (and Zelda) Fitzgerald
163. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway
164. William Faulkner
165. Dennis Wheatley
166. Elizabeth Bowen
167. Vladimir Nabokov
The Twentieth Century
168. Margaret Mitchell
169. Lewis Grassic Gibbon
170. Georgette Heyer
171. John Steinbeck
172. Postscript: John Hersey, John O’Hara
173. Geor
ge Orwell
174. Evelyn Waugh
175. Postscript: Alec Waugh
176. Nathanael West
177. Margery Allingham
178. Graham Greene
179. Patrick Hamilton
180. Christopher Isherwood
181. Henry Green
182. Arthur Koestler
183. Anthony Powell
184. Ayn Rand
185. C. P. Snow
186. Rex Warner
187. Samuel Beckett
188. John Dickson Carr
189. Catherine Cookson
190. Robert E. Howard
191. Jim Thompson
192. Leslie Charteris
193. James A. Michener
194. John Creasey
195. Ian Fleming
196. Louis L’Amour
197. Eric Ambler
198. Chester Himes
199. Malcolm Lowry
200. Postscript: Charles R. Jackson
201. Nicholas Monsarrat
202. William Golding
203. John Cheever
204. Lawrence Durrell
205. Patrick White
206. Howard Fast
207. Saul Bellow
208. Herman Wouk
209. Harold Robbins
210. Anthony Burgess
211. Arthur C. Clarke
212. Muriel Spark
213. Mickey Spillane
214. Postscript: Carroll John Daly
215. Jacqueline Susann
216. Iris Murdoch
217. Frederik Pohl
218. J. D. Salinger
219. Charles Willeford
220. Isaac Asimov
221. Ray Bradbury
222. Charles Bukowski
223. Dick Francis
224. P. D. James
225. Paul Scott
226. Patricia Highsmith
227. Kingsley Amis
228. Alistair Maclean
229. Postscript: Robert Shaw
230. Kurt Vonnegut
231. Austin M. Wright
232. V. C. Andrews
233. Norman Mailer
234. Michael Avallone
235. James Baldwin
236. Brian Aldiss
237. Elmore Leonard
238. Flannery O’Connor
239. William Styron
240. John Berger
241. John Fowles
242. Richard Yates
243. Jennifer Dawson
244. Marilyn French
245. Guillermo Cabrera Infante
246. Dan Jacobson
247. Chinua Achebe
248. J. G. Ballard
249. John Barth
250. Harold Brodkey
251. Edna O’Brien
252. Donald Barthelme
253. Toni Morrison
254. Alice Munro
255. Trevanian
256. Beryl Bainbridge
257. Malcolm Bradbury
258. V. S. Naipaul
259. Sylvia Plath
260. John Updike
261. B. S. Johnson
262. William L. Pierce
263. Reynolds Price
264. Philip Roth
265. Wilbur Smith
266. David Storey
267. Alasdair Gray
268. J. G. Farrell
269. Postscript: George MacDonald Fraser
270. David Lodge
271. Alistair MacLeod
272. John Kennedy Toole
273. Margaret Atwood
274. Postscript: Susanna Moodie
275. Jeffrey Archer
276. J. M. Coetzee
277. Postscript: Bret Easton Ellis
278. Michael Crichton
279. Peter Carey
280. W. G. Sebald
281. Vernor Vinge
282. Julian Barnes
283. Sue Townsend
284. Paul Auster
285. Postscript: Lydia Davis and Siri Hustvedt
286. Postscript: Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt
287. Salman Rushdie
288. Stephen King
289. Robert Jordan
290. Ian McEwan
291. Martin Amis and Richard Hughes
292. Patricia Cornwell
293. Alice Sebold
294. Rana Dasgupta
Epilogue
Index
There’s a huge popular appetite for secrets. As for the biographical ‘explanation’ generally it makes matters worse by adding components that aren’t there and would make no aesthetic difference if they were.
Nathan Zuckerman, Exit Ghost, Philip Roth
The personality of a writer does become important after we have read his book and begin to study it.
E. M. Forster, Anonymity: An Inquiry
A shilling life will give you all the facts.
W. H. Auden (who instructed his friends to burn all his letters, after his death)
My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the postmortem exploiter.
Henry James (before touching the light to a bonfire of his personal papers)
Authors are just fictional people about whom we have a few biographical elements, never enough to make them truly real people.
Jacques Bonnet
It does not follow that because a particular work of art succeeds in charming us, its creator also deserves our admiration.
Plutarch (in his Life of Pericles), translated by Peter Jones
Preface
A history of fiction in 294 lives
Once upon a time it would have been possible to write a comprehensive ‘Lives of the Novelists’ – around the time, I would hazard, that Walter Scott wrote his Lives of the Novelists. The 1825 field that Scott surveyed was more or less coverable by a single reader poring diligently over the ‘greats’, skimming the less than great, and sniffing at the waste-of-time majority before tossing it aside. In our time, an army of Scotts would be defeated by the two million or so eligible works in the vaults of the Scottish National Library, successor to the Advocates Library which served Sir Walter’s needs.
All modern histories of the novel are wormholes through the cheese (the novelist William Gibson’s neat analogy). The story of fiction that follows is almost as idiosyncratic as the subject itself, it being in the nature of worms to burrow less directly than crows fly – both, like literary critics, are scavengers. What I’ve written has been sustained by the belief that literary life and work are inseparable and mutually illuminating. This is not, as the epigraphs in the prelims suggest, a thesis universally accepted by the novelists themselves, but do worms care what the cheese thinks?
The reader may be shocked by encounters with a number of writers not normally granted entry to the sacred grove. I confess that I do value a range of fiction that literary history has often, in my view, wrongly undervalued. And the writers who have produced it often have the more interesting lives. By the same token, some names – including some great names – are missing from this book. I offer two excuses: first, quarts and pint pots; and second, isn’t this book big enough? A single book and one person’s reading career (however obsessive) cannot contain or cover this richest of literary fields. What I have aimed to achieve in breadth will, I hope, to some extent make up for these absences. All the novel’s varied genres are displayed in what follows, including (though the main focus is on adult literature) one or two writers best known for their books for children whom I could not bring myself to exclude.
It will be easy to see why most of those writers who did get in got in. What they have in common is that they are all novelists who have meant something to me, or who have come my way over a long reading career and stayed with me, for whatever reason.
John Sutherland
London, August 2011
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank John Davey, Jane Robertson, Peter Carson and Penny Daniel for their support, encouragement, assistance and (all too often) correction. The mistakes which remain
are, alas, all mine.
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations will be found appended to the entries:
ANB The American National Biography
Biog a biography which is a useful starting point
DCB Dictionary of Canadian Biography
FN the author’s full name(s)
MRT Must Read Text
ODNB The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The cited biographies and must-reads are my own wholly personal choices. Where biographical sources are not specifically cited they are taken from the biography which is appended at the end of the entry.
1. John Bunyan 1628–1688
I have … used Similitudes.
John Bunyan was born in Bedford in 1628, in the lowest stratum of that middle England town. His father was an illiterate brazier and tinker, a wandering tradesman. Bunyan later allegorised life’s wanderings into a pilgrimage, heavy pack on back.
Largely self-educated, Bunyan had steeped himself in the English gospels. The most familiar portrait shows him with one book under his arm – the Geneva Bible. This is the volume which, at the outset of his Progress, Christian claps to his bosom, fingers in his ears, as he runs away from his amazed wife and family, shouting ‘Life, life, eternal life’ (and to hell with child support). It struck even Mark Twain’s Huck Finn as odd. He recalls (among the little he has read) a book ‘about a man that left his family, it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.’
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