Wain and Anne Wain. His father was a dentist, and Wain went to the high school in nearby Newcastle under Lyme. He early developed an interest in jazz, something he later shared with his friends Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. He was unfit for military service and in 1943 went directly from school to St. John's College, Oxford. Though Wain was at St. John's, his tutor was the well-known renaissance scholar C. S. Lewis, at Magdalen College. Wain received his B.A. in English in 1946 and was Fereday Fellow at St. John's from 1946 to 1949. During this time he became a lecturer at Reading University, where he taught from 1947 to 1955, when, after the success of his first novel, he gave up teaching to devote all his time to writing. The years at Reading were the years of his first marriage (to Marianne Urmstrom), which was dissolved in 1956. His second novel,
Living in the Present (1955), reflects the depressing effect of the breakdown of his marriage. In 1960 he married Eirian James.
Wain's first published works were poems that appeared in 1945 in the Oxford periodical Mandrake, of which he was earlier the founding editor.
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