He also published several volumes of poetry, collections of short stories, radio and stage dramas, and critical works. His
Preliminary Essays (1957) won him the W. Somerset Maugham Award in 1958. For his literary contributions he was awarded the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1984.
Though Wain was clearly a successful novelist and poet, including him among literary biographers might, on the surface, seem hasty. He wrote only two full-length biographies of literary figures, and the first, his Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography (1962), received little attention. It was the success of Samuel Johnson (1974) that undoubtedly granted him his reputation as a foremost literary biographer: it won both the James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize and the Heinemann Award in 1975. John Wain long interested himself in the biographies of writers. He edited several volumes of personal papers, permeated his critical analyses with reconstructions of the subject's life and mind, and composed, mostly recently, short pieces of reminiscence about writers he knew, designed to give readers a sense of the person.
John Barrington Wain was born 14 March 1925 at Stoke on Trent in Staffordshire, the son of Arnold A. Wain, a dentist, and Anne Turner Wain.
This is a free page. This page contains 198 words. This
biography contains 5,642 words (approx. 19 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our John (Barrington) Wain Access Pass.
