John (Barrington) Wain Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on John (Barrington) Wain

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 published his first works in the years just following--a time when Britain was recovering from the war's devastation and when young writers were reacting against the orthodoxies of modernism. Wain, though sometimes regarded primarily as a social critic, might better be characterized as a liberal humanist. Over the years his novels have become less comically boisterous and more pessimistic, as his thematic concerns have shifted from the repressions of society to "the effects of loneliness and the remoteness of love," according to Dale Salwak in John Wain (1981). Wain's short stories show similar concerns, but, particularly in the more successful ones, he examines evil, self-destruction, and interior corrosiveness. He treats these issues philosophically, even religiously, not as case studies in social or psychological "causes" but as mysteries of human nature to be explored but never fully understood.

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