A. Alvarez writes of people under pressure. His two novels, Hers (1974) and Hunt (1978), rigorously explore the tensions of private experience. Apparent in this fiction as well as in his criticism and his poetry is Alvarez's belief that the artist must face "the full range" of experience "with his full intelligence." In his insistence upon seeing the whole individual, Alvarez stands as a modern Metaphysical, himself a follower of "the school of Donne."

Alfred Alvarez was born in London in 1929 into a family of Anglo-Sephardic background whose ancestors had lived in England since the seventeenth century. His parents were Bertie and Katie Levy Alvarez. As a child he was surrounded by the comfortable security of an upper-middle-class world. The family's wealth came from a businessman grandfather; its cultural life centered on music, which gave him his first awareness of the inner rhythm of sound. Yet in the midst of...