Born in Bristol, Christopher Fry is the son of Charles John Harris, an architect who later became a church lay reader, and Emma Marguerite Fry Hammond Harris. Fry attended Bedford Modern School in Bedford from 1918 to 1926. He became a schoolmaster, teaching at Bedford Froebel Kindergarten in 1926-1927 and Hazelwood School in Limpsfield, Surrey, from 1928 to 1931. From 1932 to 1935 he served as a founding director of the Tunbridge Wells Repertory Players, where a play he had written as a schoolboy, The Peregrines, was produced in a revised form, as curtain raiser to the English premiere of Bernard Shaw's "comediettina for two voices in three conversations," Village Wooing. He also wrote the music for a musical comedy, She Shall Have Music (1935), and a play on the life of British social reformer Dr. Thomas John Barnardo, which was performed in aid of Dr. Barnardo's Homes for Children.

These works he considers outside...