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Malcolm Bradbury | |
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| Born | Malcolm Stanley Bradbury (1932-09-07)7 September 1932 Sheffield,West Riding of Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 27 November 2000(2000-11-27) (aged 68) |
| Alma mater | University of Leicester (BA) Queen Mary College, University of London (MA) Victoria University of Manchester (PhD) |
| Years active | 1955–2000 |
| Spouse | Elizabeth Salt |
| Children | 2 |
| Website | www |
Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury,CBE (7 September 1932 – 27 November 2000) was an English author and academic.[1]
Bradbury was born inSheffield, the son of a railwayman.[2] His family moved to London in 1935, but returned to Sheffield in 1941 with his brother and mother. The family later moved toNottingham and in 1943 Bradbury attendedWest Bridgford Grammar School, where he remained until 1950. He read English atUniversity College, Leicester, gaining a first-class degree in 1953. He continued his studies atQueen Mary College, University of London, where he gained his MA in 1955.[3]
Between 1955 and 1958, Bradbury moved between teaching posts with theUniversity of Manchester andIndiana University in the United States. He returned to England in 1958 for a major heart operation; such was his heart condition that he was not expected to live beyond middle age. In 1959, while in hospital, he completed his first novel,Eating People is Wrong.
Bradbury married Elizabeth Salt and they had two sons. He took up his first teaching post as an adult-education tutor at theUniversity of Hull. With his study onEvelyn Waugh in 1962 he began his career of writing and editing critical books. From 1961 to 1965 he taught at theUniversity of Birmingham. He completed his PhD inAmerican studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to theUniversity of East Anglia (his second novel,Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched theMA in Creative Writing course, attended by bothIan McEwan andKazuo Ishiguro.[4]
He publishedPossibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973,The History Man in 1975,Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976,Rates of Exchange in 1983 andCuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987. He retired from academic life in 1995.
Bradbury became aCommander of the Order of the British Empire in 1991 for services to literature and was made aKnight Bachelor in theNew Year Honours 2000, again for services to literature.[5]
Bradbury died at Priscilla Bacon Lodge, Colman Hospital, Norwich, on 27 November 2000, attended by his wife and their two sons, Matthew and Dominic. He was buried on 4 December 2000 in the churchyard of St Mary's parish church,Tasburgh, near Norwich where the Bradburys owned a second home. Though he was not an orthodox religious believer, he respected the traditions and socio-cultural role of theChurch of England and enjoyed visiting churches in the spirit ofPhilip Larkin's poem, "Church Going".[citation needed]
Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on themodern novel, he published books onEvelyn Waugh,Saul Bellow andE. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics asF. Scott Fitzgerald'sThe Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American. However, he is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although often compared with his contemporaryDavid Lodge, a friend who has also writtencampus novels, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language. In 1986, he wrote a short humorous book titledWhy Come to Slaka?, a parody of travel books, dealing withSlaka, the fictionalEastern European country that is the setting for his novelRates of Exchange, a 1983 novel that was shortlisted for theBooker Prize.[6]
Bradbury also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such asAnything More Would Be Greedy,The Gravy Train (and its sequel,The Gravy Train Goes East, which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such asTom Sharpe'sBlott on the Landscape andPorterhouse Blue,Alison Lurie'sImaginary Friends,Kingsley Amis'sThe Green Man, and the penultimateInspector Morse episodeThe Wench is Dead. His last television script was forDalziel and Pascoe series 5, produced byAndy Rowley. The episode "Foreign Bodies" was screened onBBC One on 15 July 2000.[7]
His work was often humorous and ironic, mockingacademe,British culture, andcommunism, usually with apicaresque tone.[8]
