Malcolm Bradbury
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Sir Malcolm Bradbury (September 7, 1932 – November 27, 2000) was a British author and academic.
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Life
Born into a working class family in Sheffield, and educated at the University of Leicester, Queen Mary College, London, and the University of Manchester, Bradbury made most of his career at the University of East Anglia, where he was Professor of American Studies until his retirement in 1995. His greatest achievement there was the foundation, with Angus Wilson, of UEA Creative Writing Course, which was the first postgraduate course in creative writing to gain success and respect in the UK; many successful writers have graduated from this course, for example Ian McEwan.
Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American. However, he is best known to a wider public as a novelist. His best known novel, The History Man (1975), set in the fictional University of Watermouth, was a dark satire of academic life in the then fashionable newer universities of England; in 1981 it was made into a successful BBC television serial. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language.
He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy and The Gravy Train, and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man.
In 1986 he wrote a short humorous book titled Why Come to Slaka?, a parody of travel books, dealing with the fictional Eastern European country that is the setting for his novel Rates of Exchange.
Malcolm Bradbury was knighted in 2000.
Works
Fiction
The History Man
Main article: The History Man
Published in 1975, The History Man satirised academic life in the "glass and steel universities" that followed their "redbrick" predecessors. The protagonist is the hypocritical Harold Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.
Cuts
Commissioned by Hutchinson as part of their Hutchinson Novella series, Cuts was published in 1987. It used a host of plays on the word 'cuts' to mock the values of Thatcherist Britain in 1986 and the world of television drama production in which Bradbury had become involved after the adaptation of The History Man. Bradbury derided the philistinism of television executives who wanted to capture the market of Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown at impossibly low cost. He also explored the low esteem accorded writers in the hierarchy of television production.
Bibliography (incomplete)
- The After Dinner Game
- All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go
- Eating People is Wrong (1962)
- Stepping Westward (1968)
- The Social Context of Modern English Literature (1971)
- Who Do You Think You Are — a collection of short stories
- The History Man (1975)
- Rates of Exchange
- To the Hermitage
- Mensonge
- Why Come to Slaka? (1986)
- Cuts (1987) — a Hutchinson Novella
Quote
- If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments; we'd have the Ten Suggestions
External link
- BBC obituary (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1043975.stm)
References
- Bradbury, Malcolm. Cuts (London: Hutchinson, 1987)