Simon (Arthur Noel) Raven Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Simon (Arthur Noel) Raven

Simon Raven was a highly productive writer who made a significant and distinctive contribution to postwar English fiction, especially in the ten novels of his "Alms for Oblivion" sequence, published between 1964 and 1976. The world that Raven explores in his work is the intricate, influential world of the British upper middle classes in the convulsive period from 1945 to the 1970s: his main characters emerge from and move between the key institutions of that world--the public school, Cambridge, the army, the Houses of Parliament, the intellectual journal, the publishing house that aims to combine culture with commerce. His characters also rub shoulders with and sometimes enter into other, less public zones, however: of prostitution of a kind that caters to idiosyncratic sexual tastes; of homosexuality in a society in which, until 1967, same-sex relationships between those defined as consenting adults were illegal; of Cold War espionage; of popular journalism. Raven portrays a stratum of society that is deeply threatened both by its own desires and follies and by social and political change: his novels aim to dramatize key aspects of the history of postwar England such as the loss of empire, the fiasco of Suez, the recognition of military and economic subordination to the United States, the election of Labour governments in 1945, 1964, and 1966, the growth of student protest in the later 1960s, and the increasing importance of the media, especially television.

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