It was perhaps inevitable that David Garnett should spend most of his long life as a novelist, reviewer, and editor. His father, Edward Garnett, for sixty years a publisher's reader, discovered, encouraged, and assisted many of the most notable and serious writers whose careers began in the early years of the century. His advice seems to have been crucial to Joseph Conrad's development as a novelist and his encouragement of the greatest importance to John Galsworthy and D. H. Lawrence. Garnett's mother, Constance Garnett, translated seventy volumes of Russian literature, making available the great body of nineteenth-century Russian novels and short stories to English writers.

David Garnett was born in Brighton, but he spent his childhood in Sussex, near Kent, where his parents had built a house far enough from London to avoid the fashionable literary life that they disliked. Garnett went to school in London and then...