Biography EssayA writer of novels, short stories, poetry, and criticism, John Barrington Wain was born in Stokeon- Trent, Staffordshire, to a dentist, Arnold A. Wain, and his wife, Anne. After attendi...
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A writer of novels, short stories, poetry, and criticism, John Barrington Wain was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, to a dentist, Arnold A. Wain, and his wife, Anne. After attending high school ...
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John Wain's first novel, Hurry on Down (1953), along with Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), seemed in the early 1950s to present a new type of hero--educated and impoverished, dissatisfied with conven...
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John Wain has achieved fame as a novelist, poet, critic, biographer, and short-story writer--in short, as a modern man of letters. Like his contemporaries Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and John Braine...
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Perhaps best known as a prolific novelist and poet, John Wain also gained acclaim as a critic and, within the last two decades, as a literary biographer. Wain's first volume of poetry, Mixed Feelings:...
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[This entry was updated by Dean Baldwin (Pennsylvania State University--Erie) from the entry by Augustus M. Kolich (Pennsylvania State University) in DLB 15: British Novelists, 1930-1959, the entry by...
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Critical Essay by Jascha Kessler
[Wain's] verse way [in "Letters to Five Artists"] is to combine the sonorously slack and portentous tones of late Eliot with the informal chat of...
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Critical Essay by Terry Eagleton
Feng, it seems, was the original of Shakespeare's Claudius, and [John Wain's Feng] takes him as the protagonist of the Hamlet drama…. Feng'...
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Critical Essay by Lawrence R. Ries
The proper place to begin a study of Wain's poetry is with the examination of his basic premise: human goodness and love shall outlast violence and brutality...
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Critical Essay by Phoebe Pettingell
Wain can be as quixotic as our own Southern "Fugitive" poets (whose work he intensely admires). Like Allen Tate's Aneas, he has "an inf...
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Critical Essay by Jascha Kessler
John Wain, elected [to the Oxford Chair of Poetry] in 1973, offers nine lectures in "Professing Poetry," a charming introduction about his relation to O...
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Critical Essay by Susan Wood
[John Wain] typifies the very best of what one might call "Englishness"—good sense, moderation, a feeling for language, erudition without pretension,...
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Critical Essay by D. A. N. Jones
The Pardoner's Tale tells the stories of two men, both "forty-ish", who cannot help falling madly in love, sometimes despairingly, sometimes with...
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Critical Essay by Ben Howard
Wain is a poet of large ambitions. His early enthusiasm for the Augustan poets has left its mark on his work, not least in his hankering to make "major statements&...
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Critical Essay by Zahir Jamal
Hurry On Down is back sporting hard covers to celebrate 25 years in the business. Wain's new introduction repeats, for those who might have forgotten, that he was...
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Critical Essay by John Mellors
The story on which you first embark in The Pardoner's Tale is told in the first person by 40-ish Gus, on holiday in Wales to escape the boredom of suburbia and a...
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Critical Essay by Julian Moynahan
John Wain and Kingsley Amis, whose first novels, "Hurry on Down" and "Lucky Jim," came out the same year, 1953, formed the most considera...
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Critical Essay by Benjamin Demott
Traces of John Fowles and Vladimir Nabokov appear in John Wain's The Pardoner's Tale…. The book begins as an action-filled narrative centering o...
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