Richard Hughes (writer)
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Richard Arthur Warren Hughes (19 April, 1900-28 April 1976) was a British professional writer of poems, short stories, novels and plays.
Richard Hughes was born in Weybridge, Surrey of Welsh parentage, and educated at Charterhouse and Oriel College, Oxford, graduating in 1922.
A Charterhouse schoolmaster had sent Hughes' first published work to The Spectator in 1917. At Oxford, he met Robert Graves, also a Charterhouse boy, and they co-edited a poetry publication in 1921. Hughes' short play The Sister's Tragedy was in the West End at the Royal Court Theatre by 1922. He is credited with authorship of the world's first radio play, Danger, commissioned from him for the BBC by Nigel Playfair, and broadcast on January 15, 1924.
Hughes was employed as a journalist, and travelled widely before he married in 1932 the painter Frances Bazley. They settled for a period in Norfolk and then in 1934 at Laugharne Castle in south Wales, near the poet, Dylan Thomas (who leased the Boat House there from Hughes). In due course they had five children.
He wrote only four novels, the most famous of which is A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), which in the USA is known by the title, The Innocent Voyage. He wrote also In Hazard, and volumes of children's stories including The Spider's Palace.
During the Second World War, Hughes served in the Admiralty. After the end of the War, he spent ten years writing scripts for Ealing Studios.
His most important work is the trilogy The Human Predicament, of which only the first two volumes, The Fox in The Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1973), were complete when he died; twelve chapters, under 50 pages, of the final volume are now published. In these he follows the course of European history from the 1920s through the Second World War, including exploits of real characters — such as Hitler's escape following the abortive Munich putsch — as well as fictional.
Hughes was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in the United States an honorary member of both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the OBE in 1946.
Reference
- Richard Hughes (1994) Richard Perceval Graves
External link
- Hughes manuscripts collected at Indiana University (http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/lilly/mss/html/hughesr.html)
- Danger - a BBC article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/discover/archive_features/352.shtml)de:Richard Arthur Warren Hughes