[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 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 conventional roles, suspicious of culture and all forms of...

A 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 attending high school in Newcastle-under-Lyme, John Wain went on to St....

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 in Newcastle-under-Lyme, John Wain went on to St....