[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 A. T. Tolley (Carleton University) in DLB 27: Poets...

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: Nineteen Poems (1951), was "the conventional...

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, Wain came of age just before World War II and...

John Barrington Wain, writer: born Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire 14 March 1925; Fereday Fellow, St John's College, Oxford 1946-49 (Honorary Fellow 1985-94); Lecturer in English Literature, Reading University 1947-55; Fellow in creative arts, Brasenose College, Oxford 1971- 72 (Supernumerary Fellow 1973-94); Professor of Poetry, Oxford University...

LATE IN 1953, the young sculptor Douglas Wain-Hobson woke up to find that his name had made the national press, but not as he would have wanted. He had joined that growing band of artists whose work aggravated the Great British Public. "That statue"...

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. He is willing to admit to man's instinctive selfishness …, but human interaction ultimately transcends and overcomes petty individual inadequacies. Wain traces the source of the violence in the world to mechanization, industrialization, and the consequent dehumanization of modern society. Western civilization, he says, no longer b...

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" and execute grand designs. About eight years ago in his Letters to Five Artists Wain employed Pope's favorite form in a wide-ranging exploration of the creative process. More recently he has been inclined to compete with the statements of major English writers; or rather, to place his personal imprint upon familiar materials....

John Wain and Kingsley Amis, whose first novels, "Hurry on Down" and "Lucky Jim," came out the same year, 1953, formed the most considerable part of the not particularly well-named Angry Young Man group in postwar English letters…. [Both] have been quite versatile and complete writers in that they write excellent poetry and criticism along with their novels and short stories. (p. 14) [But they] are really very different sorts of writer. Mr. Amis's talent is comic an...