John Barrington Wain was born 14 March 1925 in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, to Arnold and Anne Turner Wain. John Wain's forebears were working-class laborers on his father's side and peasant and working-class laborers on his mother's. In Dear Shadows (1986), a collection of semi-autobiographical essays, Wain sketches an admiring portrait of his father, who scrambled up from grim poverty to become a dentist and an influential lay preacher. In 1928 the family moved to Penkhull, a step up the social ladder. Although spared the barbarities of English boarding school, Wain learned at infant school and again at Newcastle-under-Lyme High School that the world divides itself roughly into two camps: the bullies and the bullied. He traces his hatred of totalitarianism to the routine violence of school life. Humor was young Wain's means of survival. Among his earliest memories are the feelings aroused by the beauty of nature, encouraged throughout his youth by his father, an avid walker in the Staffordshire countryside. Wain could in no sense be called a nature writer, but his fictional characters often find solace and direction in nature's calming influence.
This is a free page. This page contains 172 words. This
biography contains 4,704 words (approx. 16 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our John (Barrington) Wain Access Pass.
