Stanley Middleton is a remarkably prolific novelist. Throughout the 1970s he produced a full-length novel every year. Yet his novels show no marks of mass production, and each offers a clear and fresh insight on his subject--middle-class family relationships in the Midlands of England. Middleton very deliberately avoids the metropolitan, the modish, the elegant, in favor of a sparse and perceptive realist treatment of provincial life, a sharp and unsentimental view of ordinary people. He has won respect for the careful accuracy of his dialogue and use of detail, his refusal to comfort or to glamorize, and, above all, his concern with human pain and failure.

Middleton was born 1 August 1919, to Thomas and Elizabeth Ann Burdett Middleton, in Nottingham, which is still his home and the background for all his novels. He received a B.A. in 1940 and an M.Ed. in 1952 from University College, Nottingham (which has...