His first highly successful novel,
The Old Boys, owes something in its controlled, stylized dialogue to Ivy Compton-Burnett, with whom he also shares a sense of evil immanent beneath polite surfaces. In his short stories, his debt is clearly to James Joyce, with whom he has often very favorably been compared.
He was born William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland. His father, James William Cox, was a bank manager, and his mother's maiden name was Gertrude Davison. He was educated at thirteen different Irish provincial schools before attending St. Columba's College, Dublin, from 1942 to 1946, after which he went on to Trinity College, Dublin. In Old School Ties (1976), Trevor recalls his early years as a schoolboy, beginning with the convent school in Youghal where he was twice-over a minority--as one of a handful of boys amongst many girls, and as a Protestant. But it was a happy time: "When I look back on that convent in Youghal,"he writes, "I experience a wave of happiness." He was then just six.
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