A lucid and accessible study of Angus Wilson, a magnificently eclectic novelist, who understands the theatricality of modern life, and provides maps of Englishness, maps of the anxious modern psyche and the post-war world.

Description: Sir Angus Wilson shot to fame in the late 1940's when his first stories were greeted by Sean O'Faolain and Evelyn Waugh alike with delight. He was championed at once as an odd realist providing new social maps of post-war England ? V S Pritchett was to see him as revising the conventional picture of English Character, and recovering broadness without losing humanity. He has many faces as a writer. If he inherits the comic Dickensian novel of social depth and density, he also marries this to a recognizably modern anxiety and insecurity about the self. Wilson's major books often concern creative breakdown: they depict people who undergo a crisis and/or collapse of self-belief, and then have to find the courage to invent themselves anew.

Author: Conradi, Peter