Twenty-First Century British Novelists

1 The American Renaissance in New En-gland, edited by Joel Myerson (1978)

2 American Novelists Since World War II, edited by Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman (1978)

3 Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, edited by Joel Myerson (1979)

4 American Writers in Paris, 1920–1939, edited by Karen Lane Rood (1980)

5 American Poets Since World War II, 2 parts, edited by Donald J. Greiner (1980)

6 American Novelists Since World War II, Second Series, edited by James E. Kibler Jr. (1980)

7 Twentieth-Century American Drama-tists, 2 parts, edited by John MacNich-olas (1981)

8 Twentieth-Century American Science- Fiction Writers, 2 parts, edited by David Cowart and Thomas L. Wymer (1981)

9 American Novelists, 1910–1945, 3 parts, edited by James J. Martine (1981)

10 Modern British Dramatists, 1900–1945, 2 parts, edited by Stanley Weintraub (1982)

11 American Humorists, 1800–1950, 2 parts, edited by Stanley Trachten-berg (1982)

12 American Realists and Naturalists, edited by Donald Pizer and Earl N. Harbert (1982)

13 British Dramatists Since World War II, 2 parts, edited by Stanley Weintraub (1982)

14 British Novelists Since 1960, 2 parts, edited by Jay L. Halio (1983)

15 British Novelists, 1930–1959, 2 parts, edited by Bernard Oldsey (1983)

16 The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Post-war America, 2 parts, edited by Ann Charters (1983)

17 Twentieth-Century American Historians, edited by Clyde N. Wilson (1983)

18 Victorian Novelists After 1885, edited by Ira B. Nadel and William E. Frede-man (1983)

19 British Poets, 1880–1914, edited by Donald E. Stanford (1983)

20 British Poets, 1914–1945, edited by Donald E. Stanford (1983)

21 Victorian Novelists Before 1885, edited by Ira B. Nadel and William E. Frede-man (1983)

22 American Writers for Children, 1900–1960, edited by John Cech (1983)

23 American Newspaper Journalists, 1873–1900, edited by Perry J. Ashley (1983)

24 American Colonial Writers, 1606–1734, edited by Emory Elliott (1984)


26 American Screenwriters, edited by Rob-ert E. Morsberger, Stephen O. Lesser, and Randall Clark (1984)

27 Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 1945–1960, edited by Vincent B. Sherry Jr. (1984)

28 Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fic-tion Writers, edited by Daniel Walden (1984)


30 American Historians, 1607–1865, edited by Clyde N. Wilson (1984)

31 American Colonial Writers, 1735–1781, edited by Emory Elliott (1984)

32 Victorian Poets Before 1850, edited by William E. Fredeman and Ira B. Nadel (1984)

33 Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris (1984)

34 British Novelists, 1890–1929: Tradition-alists, edited by Thomas F. Staley (1985)

35 Victorian Poets After 1850, edited by William E. Fredeman and Ira B. Nadel (1985)

36 British Novelists, 1890–1929: Modern-ists, edited by Thomas F. Staley (1985)

37 American Writers of the Early Republic, edited by Emory Elliott (1985)

38 Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dra-matists and Prose Writers, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Har-ris (1985)

39 British Novelists, 1660–1800, 2 parts, edited by Martin C. Battestin (1985)

40 Poets of Great Britain and Ireland Since 1960, 2 parts, edited by Vincent B. Sherry Jr. (1985)

41 Afro-American Poets Since 1955, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis (1985)

42 American Writers for Children Before 1900, edited by Glenn E. Estes (1985)


44 American Screenwriters, Second Series, edited by Randall Clark, Robert E.

Morsberger, and Stephen O. Lesser (1986)

45 American Poets, 1880–1945, First Series, edited by Peter Quartermain (1986)

46 American Literary Publishing Houses, 1900–1980: Trade and Paperback, edited by Peter Dzwonkoski (1986)

47 American Historians, 1866–1912, edited by Clyde N. Wilson (1986)

48 American Poets, 1880–1945, Second Series, edited by Peter Quartermain (1986)

49 American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638–1899, 2 parts, edited by Peter Dzwonkoski (1986)

50 Afro-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Trudier Harris (1986)

51 Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, edited by Trudier Harris (1987)

52 American Writers for Children Since 1960: Fiction, edited by Glenn E. Estes (1986)

53 Canadian Writers Since 1960, First Series, edited by W. H. New (1986)

54 American Poets, 1880–1945, Third Series, 2 parts, edited by Peter Quar-termain (1987)

55 Victorian Prose Writers Before 1867, edited by William B. Thesing (1987)

56 German Fiction Writers, 1914–1945, edited by James Hardin (1987)

57 Victorian Prose Writers After 1867, edited by William B. Thesing (1987)

58 Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists, edited by Fredson Bowers (1987)

59 American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1800–1850, edited by John W. Rath-bun and Monica M. Grecu (1987)

60 Canadian Writers Since 1960, Second Series, edited by W. H. New (1987)

61 American Writers for Children Since 1960: Poets, Illustrators, and Nonfic-tion Authors, edited by Glenn E. Estes (1987)

62 Elizabethan Dramatists, edited by Fredson Bowers (1987)

63 Modern American Critics, 1920–1955, edited by Gregory S. Jay (1988)


65 French Novelists, 1900–1930, edited by Catharine Savage Brosman (1988)

Dictionary of Literary Biography

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66 German Fiction Writers, 1885–1913, 2 parts, edited by James Hardin (1988)

67 Modern American Critics Since 1955, edited by Gregory S. Jay (1988)

68 Canadian Writers, 1920–1959, First Series, edited by W. H. New (1988)

69 Contemporary German Fiction Writers, First Series, edited by Wolfgang D. Elfe and James Hardin (1988)

70 British Mystery Writers, 1860–1919, edited by Bernard Benstock and Thomas F. Staley (1988)


72 French Novelists, 1930–1960, edited by Catharine Savage Brosman (1988)

73 American Magazine Journalists, 1741–1850, edited by Sam G. Riley (1988)

74 American Short-Story Writers Before 1880, edited by Bobby Ellen Kim-bel, with the assistance of William E. Grant (1988)

75 Contemporary German Fiction Writers, Second Series, edited by Wolfgang D. Elfe and James Hardin (1988)

76 Afro-American Writers, 1940–1955, edited by Trudier Harris (1988)

77 British Mystery Writers, 1920–1939, edited by Bernard Benstock and Thomas F. Staley (1988)

78 American Short-Story Writers, 1880–1910, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel, with the assistance of William E. Grant (1988)

79 American Magazine Journalists, 1850–1900, edited by Sam G. Riley (1988)

80 Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists, First Series, edited by Paula R. Backscheider (1989)

81 Austrian Fiction Writers, 1875–1913, edited by James Hardin and Donald G. Daviau (1989)

82 Chicano Writers, First Series, edited by Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shir-ley (1989)

83 French Novelists Since 1960, edited by Catharine Savage Brosman (1989)

84 Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists, Second Series, edited by Paula R. Backscheider (1989)

85 Austrian Fiction Writers After 1914, edited by James Hardin and Donald G. Daviau (1989)

86 American Short-Story Writers, 1910–1945, First Series, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel (1989)

87 British Mystery and Thriller Writers Since 1940, First Series, edited by Ber-nard Benstock and Thomas F. Staley (1989)

88 Canadian Writers, 1920–1959, Second Series, edited by W. H. New (1989)

89 Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists, Third Series, edited by Paula R. Backscheider (1989)

90 German Writers in the Age of Goethe, 1789–1832, edited by James Hardin and Christoph E. Schweitzer (1989)

91 American Magazine Journalists, 1900–1960, First Series, edited by Sam G. Riley (1990)

92 Canadian Writers, 1890–1920, edited by W. H. New (1990)

93 British Romantic Poets, 1789–1832, First Series, edited by John R. Greenfield (1990)

94 German Writers in the Age of Goethe: Sturm und Drang to Classicism, edited by James Hardin and Christoph E. Schweitzer (1990)

95 Eighteenth-Century British Poets, First Series, edited by John Sitter (1990)

96 British Romantic Poets, 1789–1832, Sec-ond Series, edited by John R. Green-field (1990)

97 German Writers from the Enlightenment to Sturm und Drang, 1720–1764, edited by James Hardin and Christoph E. Schweitzer (1990)

98 Modern British Essayists, First Series, edited by Robert Beum (1990)

99 Canadian Writers Before 1890, edited by W. H. New (1990)

100 Modern British Essayists, Second Series, edited by Robert Beum (1990)

101 British Prose Writers, 1660–1800, First Series, edited by Donald T. Siebert (1991)

102 American Short-Story Writers, 1910–1945, Second Series, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel (1991)

103 American Literary Biographers, First Series, edited by Steven Serafin (1991)

104 British Prose Writers, 1660–1800, Second Series, edited by Donald T. Siebert (1991)

105 American Poets Since World War II, Second Series, edited by R. S. Gwynn (1991)

106 British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820–1880, edited by Patricia J. Anderson and Jonathan Rose (1991)

107 British Romantic Prose Writers, 1789–1832, First Series, edited by John R. Greenfield (1991)

108 Twentieth-Century Spanish Poets, First Series, edited by Michael L. Perna (1991)

109 Eighteenth-Century British Poets, Second Series, edited by John Sitter (1991)

110 British Romantic Prose Writers, 1789–1832, Second Series, edited by John R. Greenfield (1991)

111 American Literary Biographers, Second Series, edited by Steven Serafin (1991)

112 British Literary Publishing Houses, 1881–1965, edited by Jonathan Rose and Patricia J. Anderson (1991)

113 Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers, First Series, edited by William Luis (1992)

114 Twentieth-Century Italian Poets, First Series, edited by Giovanna Wedel De Stasio, Glauco Cambon, and Antonio Illiano (1992)

115 Medieval Philosophers, edited by Jer-emiah Hackett (1992)

116 British Romantic Novelists, 1789–1832, edited by Bradford K. Mudge (1992)

117 Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, First Series, edited by Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard Sander (1992)

118 Twentieth-Century German Dramatists, 1889–1918, edited by Wolfgang D. Elfe and James Hardin (1992)

119 Nineteenth-Century French Fiction Writ-ers: Romanticism and Realism, 1800–1860, edited by Catharine Savage Brosman (1992)

120 American Poets Since World War II, Third Series, edited by R. S. Gwynn (1992)

121 Seventeenth-Century British Nondra-matic Poets, First Series, edited by M. Thomas Hester (1992)

122 Chicano Writers, Second Series, edited by Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (1992)

123 Nineteenth-Century French Fiction Writ-ers: Naturalism and Beyond, 1860–1900, edited by Catharine Savage Brosman (1992)

124 Twentieth-Century German Dramatists, 1919–1992, edited by Wolfgang D. Elfe and James Hardin (1992)

125 Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, Second Series, edited by Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard Sander (1993)

126 Seventeenth-Century British Nondra-matic Poets, Second Series, edited by M. Thomas Hester (1993)

127 American Newspaper Publishers, 1950–1990, edited by Perry J. Ashley (1993)

128 Twentieth-Century Italian Poets, Second Series, edited by Giovanna Wedel De Stasio, Glauco Cambon, and Antonio Illiano (1993)

129 Nineteenth-Century German Writers, 1841–1900, edited by James Hardin and Siegfried Mews (1993)

130 American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, edited by Patrick Meanor (1993)

131 Seventeenth-Century British Nondra-matic Poets, Third Series, edited by M. Thomas Hester (1993)

132 Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers, First Series, edited by David A. Richardson (1993)

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133 Nineteenth-Century German Writers to 1840, edited by James Hardin and Siegfried Mews (1993)

134 Twentieth-Century Spanish Poets, Sec-ond Series, edited by Jerry Phillips Winfield (1994)

135 British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880–1914: The Realist Tradition, edited by William B. Thesing (1994)

136 Sixteenth-Century British Nondramat ic Writers, Second Series, edited by David A. Richardson (1994)

137 American Magazine Journalists, 1900–1960, Second Series, edited by Sam G. Riley (1994)

138 German Writers and Works of the High Middle Ages: 1170–1280, edited by James Hardin and Will Hasty (1994)

139 British Short-Fiction Writers, 1945–1980, edited by Dean Baldwin (1994)

140 American Book-Collectors and Bibliogra-phers, First Series, edited by Joseph Rosenblum (1994)

141 British Children’s Writers, 1880–1914, edited by Laura M. Zaidman (1994)

142 Eighteenth-Century British Literary Biographers, edited by Steven Sera-fin (1994)

143 American Novelists Since World War II, Third Series, edited by James R. Giles and Wanda H. Giles (1994)

144 Nineteenth-Century British Literary Biographers, edited by Steven Sera-fin (1994)

145 Modern Latin-American Fiction Writ-ers, Second Series, edited by William Luis and Ann González (1994)

146 Old and Middle English Literature, edited by Jeffrey Helterman and Jerome Mitchell (1994)

147 South Slavic Writers Before World War II, edited by Vasa D. Mihailovich (1994)

148 German Writers and Works of the Early Middle Ages: 800–1170, edited by Will Hasty and James Hardin (1994)

149 Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Literary Biographers, edited by Steven Serafin (1995)

150 Early Modern Russian Writers, Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by Marcus C. Levitt (1995)

151 British Prose Writers of the Early Sev-enteenth Century, edited by Clayton D. Lein (1995)

152 American Novelists Since World War II, Fourth Series, edited by James R. Giles and Wanda H. Giles (1995)

153 Late-Victorian and Edwardian Brit-ish Novelists, First Series, edited by George M. Johnson (1995)

154 The British Literary Book Trade, 1700–1820, edited by James K. Bracken and Joel Silver (1995)

155 Twentieth-Century British Literary Biographers, edited by Steven Sera-fin (1995)

156 British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880–1914: The Romantic Tradition, edited by William F. Naufftus (1995)

157 Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, Third Series, edited by Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard Sander (1995)

158 British Reform Writers, 1789–1832, edited by Gary Kelly and Edd Applegate (1995)

159 British Short-Fiction Writers, 1800–1880, edited by John R. Greenfield (1996)

160 British Children’s Writers, 1914–1960, edited by Donald R. Hettinga and Gary D. Schmidt (1996)

161 British Children’s Writers Since 1960, First Series, edited by Caroline Hunt (1996)

162 British Short-Fiction Writers, 1915–1945, edited by John H. Rogers (1996)

163 British Children’s Writers, 1800–1880, edited by Meena Khorana (1996)

164 German Baroque Writers, 1580–1660, edited by James Hardin (1996)

165 American Poets Since World War II, Fourth Series, edited by Joseph Conte (1996)

166 British Travel Writers, 1837–1875, edited by Barbara Brothers and Julia Gergits (1996)

167 Sixteenth-Century British Nondra-matic Writers, Third Series, edited by David A. Richardson (1996)

168 German Baroque Writers, 1661–1730, edited by James Hardin (1996)

169 American Poets Since World War II, Fifth Series, edited by Joseph Conte (1996)

170 The British Literary Book Trade, 1475–1700, edited by James K. Bracken and Joel Silver (1996)

171 Twentieth-Century American Sports-writers, edited by Richard Oroden-ker (1996)

172 Sixteenth-Century British Nondra-matic Writers, Fourth Series, edited by David A. Richardson (1996)

173 American Novelists Since World War II, Fifth Series, edited by James R. Giles and Wanda H. Giles (1996)


175 Native American Writers of the United States, edited by Kenneth M. Roemer (1997)

176 Ancient Greek Authors, edited by Ward W. Briggs (1997)

177 Italian Novelists Since World War II, 1945–1965, edited by Augustus Pal-lotta (1997)

178 British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers Before World War I, edited by Darren Harris-Fain (1997)

179 German Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, 1280–1580, edited by James Hardin and Max Rein-hart (1997)

180 Japanese Fiction Writers, 1868–1945, edited by Van C. Gessel (1997)

181 South Slavic Writers Since World War II, edited by Vasa D. Mihailovich (1997)

182 Japanese Fiction Writers Since World War II, edited by Van C. Gessel (1997)

183 American Travel Writers, 1776–1864, edited by James J. Schramer and Donald Ross (1997)

184 Nineteenth-Century British Book-Col-lectors and Bibliographers, edited by William Baker and Kenneth Wom-ack (1997)

185 American Literary Journalists, 1945–1995, First Series, edited by Arthur J. Kaul (1998)

186 Nineteenth-Century American West-ern Writers, edited by Robert L. Gale (1998)

187 American Book Collectors and Bibli-ographers, Second Series, edited by Joseph Rosenblum (1998)

188 American Book and Magazine Illus-trators to 1920, edited by Steven E. Smith, Catherine A. Hastedt, and Donald H. Dyal (1998)

189 American Travel Writers, 1850–1915, edited by Donald Ross and James J. Schramer (1998)

190 British Reform Writers, 1832–1914, edited by Gary Kelly and Edd Applegate (1998)

191 British Novelists Between the Wars, edited by George M. Johnson (1998)

192 French Dramatists, 1789–1914, edited by Barbara T. Cooper (1998)

193 American Poets Since World War II, Sixth Series, edited by Joseph Conte (1998)

194 British Novelists Since 1960, Second Series, edited by Merritt Moseley (1998)


196 Italian Novelists Since World War II, 1965–1995, edited by Augustus Pal-lotta (1999)

197 Late-Victorian and Edwardian Brit-ish Novelists, Second Series, edited by George M. Johnson (1999)

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198 Russian Literature in the Age of Pushkin and Gogol: Prose, edited by Christine A. Rydel (1999)

199 Victorian Women Poets, edited by Wil-liam B. Thesing (1999)

200 American Women Prose Writers to 1820, edited by Carla J. Mulford, with Angela Vietto and Amy E. Winans (1999)

201 Twentieth-Century British Book Collec-tors and Bibliographers, edited by Wil-liam Baker and Kenneth Womack (1999)

202 Nineteenth-Century American Fiction Writers, edited by Kent P. Ljungquist (1999)

203 Medieval Japanese Writers, edited by Steven D. Carter (1999)

204 British Travel Writers, 1940–1997, edited by Barbara Brothers and Julia M. Gergits (1999)

205 Russian Literature in the Age of Push-kin and Gogol: Poetry and Drama, edited by Christine A. Rydel (1999)

206 Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, First Series, edited by Richard H. Cracroft (1999)

207 British Novelists Since 1960, Third Series, edited by Merritt Moseley (1999)

208 Literature of the French and Occitan Middle Ages: Eleventh to Fifteenth Cen-turies, edited by Deborah Sinnreich-Levi and Ian S. Laurie (1999)

209 Chicano Writers, Third Series, edited by Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (1999)

210 Ernest Hemingway: A Documentary Vol-ume, edited by Robert W. Trogdon (1999)

211 Ancient Roman Writers, edited by Ward W. Briggs (1999)

212 Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, Second Series, edited by Rich-ard H. Cracroft (1999)

213 Pre-Nineteenth-Century British Book Col-lectors and Bibliographers, edited by William Baker and Kenneth Womack (1999)

214 Twentieth-Century Danish Writers, edited by Marianne Stecher-Hansen (1999)

215 Twentieth-Century Eastern European Writers, First Series, edited by Steven Serafin (1999)

216 British Poets of the Great War: Brooke, Rosenberg, Thomas. A Documentary Vol-ume, edited by Patrick Quinn (2000)

217 Nineteenth-Century French Poets, edited by Robert Beum (2000)

218 American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, Second Series, edited by Patrick Meanor and Gwen Crane (2000)

219 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Documentary Volume, edited by Mat-thew J. Bruccoli (2000)

220 Twentieth-Century Eastern European Writers, Second Series, edited by Steven Serafin (2000)

221 American Women Prose Writers, 1870–1920, edited by Sharon M. Harris, with the assistance of Heidi L. M. Jacobs and Jennifer Putzi (2000)

222 H. L. Mencken: A Documentary Volume, edited by Richard J. Schrader (2000)

223 The American Renaissance in New En-gland, Second Series, edited by Wesley T. Mott (2000)

224 Walt Whitman: A Documentary Volume, edited by Joel Myerson (2000)

225 South African Writers, edited by Paul A. Scanlon (2000)

226 American Hard-Boiled Crime Writers, edited by George Parker Anderson and Julie B. Anderson (2000)

227 American Novelists Since World War II, Sixth Series, edited by James R. Giles and Wanda H. Giles (2000)

228 Twentieth-Century American Drama-tists, Second Series, edited by Christo-pher J. Wheatley (2000)

229 Thomas Wolfe: A Documentary Volume, edited by Ted Mitchell (2001)

230 Australian Literature, 1788–1914, edited by Selina Samuels (2001)

231 British Novelists Since 1960, Fourth Series, edited by Merritt Moseley (2001)

232 Twentieth-Century Eastern European Writers, Third Series, edited by Steven Serafin (2001)

233 British and Irish Dramatists Since World War II, Second Series, edited by John Bull (2001)

234 American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, Third Series, edited by Patrick Meanor and Richard E. Lee (2001)

235 The American Renaissance in New En-gland, Third Series, edited by Wesley T. Mott (2001)

236 British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500–1660, edited by Edward A. Malone (2001)

237 The Beats: A Documentary Volume, edited by Matt Theado (2001)

238 Russian Novelists in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, edited by J. Alexander Ogden and Judith E. Kalb (2001)

239 American Women Prose Writers: 1820–1870, edited by Amy E. Hudock and Katharine Rodier (2001)

240 Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets, edited by William B. Thesing (2001)

241 American Sportswriters and Writers on Sport, edited by Richard Orodenker (2001)

242 Twentieth-Century European Cultural Theorists, First Series, edited by Paul Hansom (2001)

243 The American Renaissance in New En-gland, Fourth Series, edited by Wesley T. Mott (2001)

244 American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, Fourth Series, edited by Patrick Meanor and Joseph McNich-olas (2001)

245 British and Irish Dramatists Since World War II, Third Series, edited by John Bull (2001)

246 Twentieth-Century American Cultural Theorists, edited by Paul Hansom (2001)

247 James Joyce: A Documentary Volume, edited by A. Nicholas Fargnoli (2001)

248 Antebellum Writers in the South, Sec-ond Series, edited by Kent Ljungquist (2001)

249 Twentieth-Century American Drama-tists, Third Series, edited by Christo-pher Wheatley (2002)

250 Antebellum Writers in New York, Sec-ond Series, edited by Kent Ljungquist (2002)

251 Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers, edited by Douglas Ivison (2002)

252 British Philosophers, 1500–1799, edited by Philip B. Dematteis and Peter S. Fosl (2002)

253 Raymond Chandler: A Documentary Vol-ume, edited by Robert Moss (2002)

254 The House of Putnam, 1837–1872: A Documentary Volume, edited by Ezra Greenspan (2002)

255 British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers, 1918–1960, edited by Darren Harris-Fain (2002)

256 Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, Third Series, edited by Rich-ard H. Cracroft (2002)

257 Twentieth-Century Swedish Writers After World War II, edited by Ann- Charlotte Gavel Adams (2002)

258 Modern French Poets, edited by Jean-François Leroux (2002)

259 Twentieth-Century Swedish Writers Before World War II, edited by Ann-Charlotte Gavel Adams (2002)

260 Australian Writers, 1915–1950, edited by Selina Samuels (2002)

261 British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writ-ers Since 1960, edited by Darren Harris- Fain (2002)

262 British Philosophers, 1800–2000, edited by Peter S. Fosl and Leemon B. McHenry (2002)

263 William Shakespeare: A Documentary Volume, edited by Catherine Loomis (2002)

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264 Italian Prose Writers, 1900–1945, edited by Luca Somigli and Rocco Capozzi (2002)

265 American Song Lyricists, 1920–1960, edited by Philip Furia (2002)

266 Twentieth-Century American Drama-tists, Fourth Series, edited by Chris-topher J. Wheatley (2002)

267 Twenty-First-Century British and Irish Novelists, edited by Michael R. Molino (2002)

268 Seventeenth-Century French Writers, edited by Françoise Jaouën (2002)

269 Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Documen-tary Volume, edited by Benjamin Franklin V (2002)

270 American Philosophers Before 1950, edited by Philip B. Dematteis and Leemon B. McHenry (2002)

271 British and Irish Novelists Since 1960, edited by Merritt Moseley (2002)

272 Russian Prose Writers Between the World Wars, edited by Christine Rydel (2003)

273 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night: A Documentary Volume, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and George Parker Anderson (2003)

274 John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.: A Documen-tary Volume, edited by Donald Pizer (2003)

275 Twentieth-Century American Nature Writers: Prose, edited by Roger Thompson and J. Scott Bryson (2003)

276 British Mystery and Thriller Writers Since 1960, edited by Gina Mac-donald (2003)

277 Russian Literature in the Age of Real-ism, edited by Alyssa Dinega Gil-lespie (2003)

278 American Novelists Since World War II, Seventh Series, edited by James R. Giles and Wanda H. Giles (2003)

279 American Philosophers, 1950–2000, edited by Philip B. Dematteis and Leemon B. McHenry (2003)

280 Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Fal-con: A Documentary Volume, edited by Richard Layman (2003)

281 British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500–1660, Second Series, edited by Edward A. Malone (2003)

282 New Formalist Poets, edited by Jona-than N. Barron and Bruce Meyer (2003)

283 Modern Spanish American Poets, First Series, edited by María A. Sal-gado (2003)

284 The House of Holt, 1866–1946: A Doc-umentary Volume, edited by Ellen D. Gilbert (2003)

285 Russian Writers Since 1980, edited by Marina Balina and Mark Lipoyvetsky (2004)

286 Castilian Writers, 1400–1500, edited by Frank A. Domínguez and George D. Greenia (2004)

287 Portuguese Writers, edited by Mon-ica Rector and Fred M. Clark (2004)

288 The House of Boni & Liveright, 1917–1933: A Documentary Volume, edited by Charles Egleston (2004)

289 Australian Writers, 1950–1975, edited by Selina Samuels (2004)

290 Modern Spanish American Poets, Sec-ond Series, edited by María A. Sal-gado (2004)

291 The Hoosier House: Bobbs-Merrill and Its Predecessors, 1850–1985: A Docu-mentary Volume, edited by Richard J. Schrader (2004)

292 Twenty-First-Century American Nov-elists, edited by Lisa Abney and Suzanne Disheroon-Green (2004)

293 Icelandic Writers, edited by Patrick J. Stevens (2004)

294 James Gould Cozzens: A Documentary Volume, edited by Matthew J. Bruc-coli (2004)

295 Russian Writers of the Silver Age, 1890–1925, edited by Judith E. Kalb and J. Alexander Ogden with the collaboration of I. G. Vishnevetsky (2004)

296 Twentieth-Century European Cul-tural Theorists, Second Series, edited by Paul Hansom (2004)

297 Twentieth-Century Norwegian Writ-ers, edited by Tanya Thresher (2004)

298 Henry David Thoreau: A Documen-tary Volume, edited by Richard J. Schneider (2004)

299 Holocaust Novelists, edited by Efraim Sicher (2004)

300 Danish Writers from the Reformation to Decadence, 1550–1900, edited by Marianne Stecher-Hansen (2004)

301 Gustave Flaubert: A Documentary Volume, edited by Éric Le Calvez (2004)

302 Russian Prose Writers After World War II, edited by Christine Rydel (2004)

303 American Radical and Reform Writ-ers, First Series, edited by Steven Rosendale (2005)

304 Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Documen-tary Volume, edited by Elizabeth Miller (2005)

305 Latin American Dramatists, First Series, edited by Adam Versényi (2005)

306 American Mystery and Detective Writers, edited by George Parker Anderson (2005)

307 Brazilian Writers, edited by Monica Rector and Fred M. Clark (2005)

308 Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: A Documentary Volume, edited by Charles Oliver (2005)

309 John Steinbeck: A Documentary Vol-ume, edited by Luchen Li (2005)

310 British and Irish Dramatists Since World War II, Fourth Series, edited by John Bull (2005)

311 Arabic Literary Culture, 500–925, edited by Michael Cooperson and Shawkat M. Toorawa (2005)

312 Asian American Writers, edited by Deborah L. Madsen (2005)

313 Writers of the French Enlightenment, I, edited by Samia I. Spencer (2005)

314 Writers of the French Enlightenment, II, edited by Samia I. Spencer (2005)

315 Langston Hughes: A Documentary Volume, edited by Christopher C. De Santis (2005)

316 American Prose Writers of World War I: A Documentary Volume, edited by Steven Trout (2005)

317 Twentieth-Century Russian Émigré Writers, edited by Maria Rubins (2005)

318 Sixteenth-Century Spanish Writers, edited by Gregory B. Kaplan (2006)

319 British and Irish Short-Fiction Writers 1945–2000, edited by Cheryl Alex-ander Malcolm and David Mal-colm (2006)

320 Robert Penn Warren: A Documentary Volume, edited by James A. Grim-shaw Jr. (2006)

321 Twentieth-Century French Drama-tists, edited by Mary Anne O’Neil (2006)

322 Twentieth-Century Spanish Fiction Writers, edited by Marta E. Altisent and Cristina Martínez-Carazo (2006)

323 South Asian Writers in English, edited by Fakrul Alam (2006)

324 John O’Hara: A Documentary Vol-ume, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (2006)

325 Australian Writers, 1975–2000, edited by Selina Samuels (2006)

326 Booker Prize Novels, 1969–2005, edited by Merritt Moseley (2006)

327 Sixteenth-Century French Writers, edited by Megan Conway (2006)

328 Chinese Fiction Writers, 1900–1949, edited by Thomas Moran (2007)

329 Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature, Part 1: Agnon–Eucken (2007)

330 Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature, Part 2: Faulkner–Kipling (2007)

331 Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature, Part 3: Lagerkvist–Pontoppidan (2007)

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332 Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature, Part 4: Quasimodo–Yeats (2007)

333 Writers in Yiddish, edited by Joseph Sherman (2007)

334 Twenty-First-Century Canadian Writ-ers, edited by Christian Riegel (2007)

335 American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, Fifth Series, edited by Richard E. Lee and Patrick Meanor (2007)

336 Eighteenth-Century British Historians, edited by Ellen J. Jenkins (2007)

337 Castilian Writers, 1200–1400, edited by George D. Greenia and Frank A. Domínguez (2008)

338 Thomas Carlyle: A Documentary Vol-ume, edited by Frances Frame (2008)

339 Seventeenth-Century Italian Poets and Dramatists, edited by Albert N. Man-cini and Glenn Palen Pierce (2008)

340 The Brontës: A Documentary Volume, edited by Susan B. Taylor (2008)

341 Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Fifth Series, edited by Garrett Eisler (2008)

342 Twentieth-Century American Nature Poets, edited by J. Scott Bryson and Roger Thompson (2008)

343 Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huck-leberry Finn: A Documentary Volume, edited by Tom Quirk (2009)

344 Nineteenth-Century British Dramatists, edited by Angela Courtney (2009)

345 American Radical and Reform Writers, Second Series, edited by Hester Lee Furey (2009)

346 Twentieth-Century Arab Writers, edited by Majd Yaser Al-Mallah and Coeli Fitzpatrick (2009)

347 Twenty-First-Century “Black” British Writ-ers, edited by R. Victoria Arana (2009)

348 Southeast Asian Writers, edited by David Smyth (2009)

349 Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: A Docu-mentary Volume, edited by Jean-François Leroux (2009)

350 Twenty-First-Century American Novel-ists, Second Series, edited by Wanda H. Giles and James R. Giles (2009)

351 Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Documentary Volume, edited by Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (2010)

352 Twentieth-Century British Humorists, edited by Paul Matthew St. Pierre (2010)

353 Twenty-First-Century Central and East-ern European Writers, edited by Ste-ven Serafin and Vasa D. Mihailovich (2010)

354 Norwegian Writers, 1500 to 1900, edited by Lanae H. Isaacson (2010)

355 The House of Knopf, 1915–1960, edited by Cathy Henderson and Richard W. Oram (2010)

356 Eighteenth-Century British Literary Scholars and Critics, edited by Frans De Bruyn (2010)

357 Stephen Crane: A Documentary Volume, edited by Paul Sorrentino (2010)

358 Classical Chinese Writers of the Pre-Tang Period, edited by Curtis Dean Smith (2011)

359 Russian Poets of the Soviet Era, edited by Karen Rosneck (2011)

360 Contemporary African Writers, edited by Tanure Ojaide (2011)

361 Theodore Dreiser’s An American Trag-edy: A Documentary Volume, edited by Donald Pizer (2011)

362 Canadian Literary Humorists, edited by Paul Matthew St. Pierre (2011)

363 Jane Austen’s Life and Novels: A Docu-mentary Volume, edited by Joan Klin-gel Ray (2012)

364 American World War II Correspondents, edited by Jeffery B. Cook (2012)

365 Jane Austen’s Popular and Critical Rep-utation: A Documentary Volume, edited by Joan Klingel Ray (2012)

366 Orientalist Writers, edited by Coeli Fitz-patrick and Dwayne A. Tunstall (2012)

367 African Lusophone Writers, edited by Monica Rector and Richard Vernon (2012)

368 Theodore Dreiser: A Documentary Volume, edited by Stephen C. Brennan (2012)

369 Vladimir Nabokov: A Documentary Volume, edited by Matthew Beedham (2013)

370 Chinese Fiction Writers, 1950–2000, edited by Thomas Moran and Ye (Dianna) Xu (2013)

371 Marcel Proust: A Documentary Volume, edited by William C. Carter (2013)

372 Twenty-First-Century American Poets, edited by John Cusatis (2013)

373 Turkish Novelists Since 1960, edited by Burcu Alkan and Çimen Günay-Erkol (2014)

374 Twenty-First-Century American Poets, edited by John Cusatis (2014)

375 Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: A Documentary Volume, ed-ited by Carolyn Sigler (2014)

376 Lewis Carroll Beyond Wonderland: A Documentary Volume, edited by Caro-lyn Sigler (2015)

377 Twenty-First-Century British Novelists, edited by Tom Ue (2016)

Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series

1 Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, edited by Margaret A. Van Antwerp (1982)

2 James Gould Cozzens, James T. Farrell, Wil-liam Faulkner, John O’Hara, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, edited by Margaret A. Van Antwerp (1982)

3 Saul Bellow, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Kurt Vonne-gut, edited by Mary Bruccoli (1983)

4 Tennessee Williams, edited by Margaret A. Van Antwerp and Sally Johns (1984)

5 American Transcendentalists, edited by Joel Myerson (1988)

6 Hardboiled Mystery Writers: Raymond Chan-dler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Rich-ard Layman (1989)

7 Modern American Poets: James Dickey, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, edited by Karen L. Rood (1989)

8 The Black Aesthetic Movement, edited by Jeffrey Louis Decker (1991)

9 American Writers of the Vietnam War: W. D. Ehrhart, Larry Heinemann, Tim O’Brien, Walter McDonald, John M. Del Vecchio, edited by Ronald Baughman (1991)

10 The Bloomsbury Group, edited by Edward L. Bishop (1992)

11 American Proletarian Culture: The Twen-ties and the Thirties, edited by Jon Chris-tian Suggs (1993)

12 Southern Women Writers: Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, edited by Mary Ann Wimsatt and Karen L. Rood (1994)

13 The House of Scribner, 1846–1904, edited by John Delaney (1996)

14 Four Women Writers for Children, 1868–1918, edited by Caroline C. Hunt (1996)

15 American Expatriate Writers: Paris in the Twenties, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Robert W. Trogdon (1997)



18 British Poets of The Great War: Sassoon, Graves, Owen, edited by Patrick Quinn (1999)

19 James Dickey, edited by Judith S. Baugh-man (1999)

See also DLB 210, 216, 219, 222, 224, 229, 237, 247, 253, 254, 263, 269, 273, 274, 280, 284, 288, 291, 294, 298, 301, 304, 308, 309, 315, 316, 320, 324, 338, 340, 343, 349, 351, 355, 357, 361, 363, 365, 368, 369, 371, 375, 376

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Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbooks

1980 edited by Karen L. Rood, Jean W. Ross, and Richard Ziegfeld (1981)

1981 edited by Karen L. Rood, Jean W. Ross, and Richard Ziegfeld (1982)

1982 edited by Richard Ziegfeld; asso-ciate editors: Jean W. Ross and Lynne C. Zeigler (1983)

1983 edited by Mary Bruccoli and Jean W. Ross; associate editor Richard Ziegfeld (1984)

1984 edited by Jean W. Ross (1985)

1985 edited by Jean W. Ross (1986)

1986 edited by J. M. Brook (1987)



1990 edited by James W. Hipp (1991)



1993 edited by James W. Hipp, con-tributing editor George Garrett (1994)



1996 edited by Samuel W. Bruce and L. Kay Webster, contributing edi-tor George Garrett (1997)

1997 edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and George Garrett, with the assistance of L. Kay Webster (1998)

1998 edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, contributing editor George Gar-rett, with the assistance of D. W. Thomas (1999)

1999 edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, contributing editor George Gar-rett, with the assistance of D. W. Thomas (2000)

2000 edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, contributing editor George Garrett, with the assistance of George Parker Anderson (2001)

2001 edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, contributing editor George Garrett, with the assistance of George Parker Anderson (2002)

2002 edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and George Garrett; George Parker Anderson, Assistant Edi-tor (2003)

Concise SeriesConcise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 7 volumes (1988–1999): The New Consciousness, 1941–1968; Colonization to the American Renaissance, 1640–1865; Realism, Naturalism, and Local Color, 1865–1917; The Twenties, 1917–1929; The Age of Maturity, 1929–1941; Broadening Views, 1968–1988; Supplement: Modern Writers, 1900–1998.

Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 8 volumes (1991–1992): Writers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance Before 1660; Writers of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1660–1789; Writers of the Roman-tic Period, 1789–1832; Victorian Writers, 1832–1890; Late-Victorian and Edwardian Writers, 1890–1914; Modern Writers, 1914–1945; Writers After World War II, 1945–1960; Contemporary Writers, 1960 to Present.

Concise Dictionary of World Literary Biography, 4 volumes (1999–2000): Ancient Greek and Roman Writers; German Writers; African, Caribbean, and Latin American Writers; South Slavic and Eastern Euro-pean Writers.

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Dictionary of Literary Biography® • Volume Three Hundred Seventy-Seven

Twenty-First-Century British Novelists

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ISSN: 1096-8547



Edited by

Tom Ue University College London

A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book

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Gale 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535

Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 19 18 17 16 15

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 377: Twenty-First-Century British NovelistsTom Ue

Founding Editors: Matthew J. Bruccoli, Editorial Director

(1931–2008) C. E. Frazer Clark Jr., Managing Editor

(1925–2001)

Editorial Director: Richard Layman

© 2016 Gale, Cengage Learning

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Twenty-first century British novelists / edited by Tom Ue, University College London. pages cm. — (Dictionary of literary biography ; 377) Summary: “Biographical entries on 21st-century British novelists, including interviews with some of the subjects”— Provided by publisher. “A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7876-9652-8 (hardback) 1. Authors, English—21st century—Biography—Dictionaries. I. Ue, Tom editor. PR106.T88 2016 820.9–dc23 [B] 2015033366

ISBN-13: 978-0-7876-9652-8 ISSN 1096-8547

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Many biographers, novelists, editors, agents, publicists, and librarians contributed to and are celebrated in

this volume, and it is to them that it is warmly dedicated.

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xv

Plan of the Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xviiIntroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix

Iain M. Banks (1954–2013) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Andrew M. Butler

Julian Barnes (1946– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15Tom Ue

William Boyd (1952– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31Zachary Seager

Jonathan Coe (1961– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43Francesco Di Bernardo

Interview with Jonathan Coe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55Julia Jordan

Neil Gaiman (1960– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65Susan Tan

Mark Haddon (1962– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76Thomas Laurie Reid

Alan Hollinghurst (1954– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85John Morton

Kazuo Ishiguro (1954– ). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95Barry Lewis

P. D. James (1920–2014) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .105Charlotte Beyer

Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117Colin Burrow

John le Carré (David John Moore Cornwell)(1931– ) . . . . .125Myron J. Aronoff

David Lodge (1935– ). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .145Alan Ashton-Smith

Ian McEwan (1948– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161Tom Fleming

David Mitchell (1969– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .175John James

Contents

Interview with David Mitchell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .186Tom Ue

Patrick Ness (1971– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .190Tom Ue

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200Pete Orford

Philip Pullman (1946– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211Pete Orford

Interview with Philip Pullman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223Pete Orford and Tom Ue

Ruth Rendell (Barbara Vine) (1930–2015) . . . . . .237Jake Kerridge

J. K. Rowling (1965– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250Pete Orford

Salman Rushdie (1947– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258Michael Perfect

Will Self (1961– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283Alan Ashton-Smith

Interview with Will Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293Alan Ashton-Smith

Ali Smith (1962– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299Daniel Lea

D. J. Taylor (1960– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .310Zachary Seager

Interview with D. J. Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .319Jonathan Barnes and Tom Ue

Sue Townsend (1946–2014) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326Simon N. Dixon

Sarah Waters (1966– ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336Charlotte Beyer

Checklist for Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349Cumulative Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353

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Plan of the Series

. . . Almost the most prodigious asset of a country, and perhaps its most precious possession, is its native literary product—when that product is fine and noble and enduring.

Mark Twain*

The advisory board, the editors, and the pub-lisher of the Dictionary of Literary Biography are joined in endorsing Mark Twain’s declaration. The litera-ture of a nation provides an inexhaustible resource of permanent worth. Our purpose is to make liter-ature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and the reading public, while satisfying the needs of teachers and researchers.

To meet these requirements, literary biography has been construed in terms of the author’s achieve-ment. The most important thing about a writer is his writing. Accordingly, the entries in DLB are career biographies, tracing the development of the au-thor’s canon and the evolution of his reputation.

The purpose of DLB is not only to provide reli-able information in a usable format but also to place the figures in the larger perspective of literary history and to offer appraisals of their accomplishments by qualified scholars.

The publication plan for DLB resulted from two years of preparation. The project was proposed to Bruccoli Clark by Frederick G. Ruffner, president of the Gale Research Company, in November 1975. After specimen entries were prepared and typeset, an advisory board was formed to refine the entry format and develop the series rationale. In meetings held during 1976, the publisher, series editors, and advi-sory board approved the scheme for a comprehensive biographical dictionary of persons who contributed to literature. Editorial work on the first volume began in January 1977, and it was published in 1978. In order to make DLB more than a dictionary and to compile volumes that individually have claim to status as literary history, it was decided to organize volumes by topic, period, or genre. Each of these freestand ing

volumes provides a biographical- bibliographical guide and overview for a particular area of literature. We are convinced that this organization— as opposed to a single alphabet method—constitutes a valuable innovation in the presentation of reference material. The volume plan necessarily requires many decisions for the placement and treatment of authors. Cer-tain figures will be included in separate volumes, but with different entries emphasizing the aspect of his career appropriate to each volume. Ernest Heming-way, for example, is represented in American Writers in Paris, 1920–1939 by an entry focusing on his expa-triate apprenticeship; he is also in American Novelists, 1910–1945 with an entry surveying his entire career, as well as in American Short-Story Writers, 1910–1945, Sec-ond Series with an entry concentrating on his short fiction. Each volume includes a cumulative index of the subject authors and articles.

Between 1981 and 2002 the series was aug-mented and updated by the DLB Yearbooks. There have also been nineteen DLB Documentary Series vol-umes, which provide illustrations, facsimiles, and biographical and critical source materials for figures, works, or groups judged to have particular interest for students. In 1999 the Documentary Series was incor-porated into the DLB volume numbering system beginning with DLB 210: Ernest Hemingway.

We define literature as the intellectual commerce of a nation: not merely as belles lettres but as that ample and complex process by which ideas are gen-erated, shaped, and transmitted. DLB entries are not limited to “creative writers” but extend to other fig-ures who in their time and in their way influenced the mind of a people. Thus the series encompasses historians, journalists, publishers, book collectors, and screenwriters. By this means readers of DLB may be aided to perceive literature not as cult scripture in the keeping of intellectual high priests but firmly positioned at the center of a nation’s life.

DLB includes the major writers appropriate to each volume and those standing in the ranks behind them. Scholarly and critical counsel has been sought in deciding which minor figures to include and how full their entries should be. Wherever possible, useful

*From an unpublished section of Mark Twain’s auto-biography, copyright by the Mark Twain Company.

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Plan of the Series DLB 377

references are made to figures who do not warrant separate entries.

Each DLB volume has an expert volume edi-tor responsible for planning the volume, selecting the figures for inclusion, and assigning the entries. Volume editors are also responsible for preparing, where appropriate, appendices surveying the major periodicals and literary and intellectual movements for their volumes, as well as lists of further readings. Work on the series as a whole is coordinated at the Bruccoli Clark Layman editorial center in Columbia, South Carolina, where the editorial staff is responsi-ble for accuracy and utility of the published volumes.

One feature that distinguishes DLB is the illus-tration policy—its concern with the iconography of literature. Just as an author is influenced by his sur-roundings, so is the reader’s understanding of the author enhanced by a knowledge of his environment. Therefore DLB volumes include not only drawings,

paintings, and photographs of authors, often depict-ing them at various stages in their careers, but also illustrations of their families and places where they lived. Title pages are regularly reproduced in facsim-ile along with dust jackets for modern authors. The dust jackets are a special feature of DLB because they often document better than anything else the way in which an author’s work was perceived in its own time. Specimens of the writers’ manuscripts and letters are included when feasible.

Samuel Johnson rightly decreed that “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.” The purpose of the Dictionary of Literary Biogra-phy is to compile literary history in the surest way available to us—by accurate and comprehensive treatment of the lives and work of those who con-tributed to it.

The DLB Advisory Board

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Introduction

Since 1978 the Dictionary of Literary Biography has been one of the world’s most comprehensive resources for literary studies, covering more than 12,000 authors, works, and topics. DLB 377: Twenty-First-Century British Novelists contributes to this criti-cal heritage by providing up-to-date biographies of twenty-five novelists: sixteen writers have appeared as subjects in earlier DLBs and nine—Mark Had-don, David Mitchell, Patrick Ness, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Ali Smith, D. J. Taylor, and Sarah Waters—are appearing for the first time. The table of contents is notable for its variety: the list includes both men and women; both “literary” and genre writers; and both adult and young-adult authors. The roster also features authors at all stages of their careers, from those whose voices continue to develop to those whose lives have recently ended.

DLB 377 revisits the careers of novelists who were previously covered—Julian Barnes has authored twelve books including four novels since his earlier appearance in DLB 194: British Novelists Since 1960, Second Series—and it expands both the range and the scope of the DLB series by introducing distinc-tive voices whose work have challenged our critical and creative thinking. DLB 372: Twenty-First-Century American Poets, edited by John Cusatis, marked the first time in which several biographical entries were accompanied by interviews. Following its lead, DLB 377 integrates original interviews with novelists Jona-than Coe, David Mitchell, Philip Pullman, Will Self, and D. J. Taylor, giving the novelists an opportunity to revisit their novels, to offer commentary on the literary and cultural scenes that inspired their work, to illuminate our understanding of the metropoli-tan tradition of commerce with literary journalism, and to give us a glimpse of their ongoing and future projects. In his Design25 winning typographic map, Dex celebrates the rich literary heritage of England’s capital by showing a wide range of literary charac-ters in the parts of the city where they are regularly found or where they call home. It reveals, in this way, the new brushing shoulders with the old. DLB 377 too reveals novelists’ engagement with earlier writers: Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), for instance, opens

with an epigraph from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), a novel that similarly draws on the Gothic and that features an imaginative, young female protago-nist. Both the entries and interviews collected in this volume reveal the authors’ borrowings from and responses to their literary antecedents.

DLB 377 builds on and works alongside other books in the series on British novelists—four volumes devoted to British Novelists Since 1960 as well as DLB 267: Twenty-First-Century British and Irish Novelists; DLB 271: British and Irish Novelists Since 1960; and DLB 347: Twenty-First-Century “Black” British Novelists—to for-ward an evolving and deepening view of contempo-rary writing. DLB 377 shows how British novelists have responded—sometimes directly, often indirectly—to a series of pressing literary, material, social, and cultural issues, including the increased censorship, whether self- or socially imposed, in the age of infor-mation (a topic addressed by Patrick Ness); the need for archetypal stories (by Philip Pullman); the part that media, cinema, and television plays in contem-porary culture (by Jonathan Coe); and the growing role of women in all aspects of British publishing, except at the top corporate posts (an issue addressed by the front cover of the The Bookseller magazine for 13 February 2015). These biographical entries attend to novelists’ engagement, in their writing and in their everyday lives, with national and international events, including the September 11 attacks and the War on Terror. After all, as J. K. Rowling observes in her 2008 Harvard Commencement speech, which was subsequently published in aid of the children’s charity Lumos as Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination (2015), “Imagination is not only the uniquely human capac-ity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation; in its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

Beyond the capacities of the writers of DLB 377 to engage imaginatively their culture in indi-vidual ways, a salient trait, perhaps, of twenty-first-century British literature is the level of synergy and

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A literary map of London by the artist and graphic designer Dex, depicting the rich cultural history of the city (courtesy of Dex)

Introduction DLB 377

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mutual-reciprocity between life writing—diaries, let-ters, memoirs, biography—and the novel, as many of these writers have investigated and, implicitly or explicitly, offered commentary on the form of the biography and its social, political, epistemological, and ethical implications. Hermione Lee suggests in Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography (2005) that what we desire from life writing is “a vivid sense of the person.” Lee writes: “The reader’s first question of the biographer is always going to be, what was she, or he, like? Other questions (like why, or how do you know, or do we approve, or does it matter?) may fol-low. But ‘likeness’ must be there. And when we are reading other forms of life-writing . . . or when we are trying ourselves to tell the story of a life, whether in an obituary, or in a conversation, or in a confession, or in a book, we are always drawn to moments of inti-macy, revelation, or particular inwardness.”

The challenges of capturing a life have been the subject of careful scrutiny in novels as much as biographies. Lee directs us to an episode in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) wherein a skywriting air-plane commands the attention of a crowd of onlook-ers in the Mall as they try to make sense of letters that “moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky”:

“Glaxo,” said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awe-stricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up.

“Kreemo,” murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleep-walker. With his hat held out perfectly still in his hand, Mr. Bowley gazed straight up. All down the Mall people were standing and looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world became perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls.

The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater—

“That’s an E,” said Mrs. Bletchley—or a dancer—“It’s toffee,” murmured Mr. Bowley—

As the airplane weaves in and out of the clouds, its sound bores “into the ears of all the people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in Regent’s Park.” Yet, the message that it seeks to relay is lost in translation: the smoke dissolves as quickly as it was created, and for all the speculations of the viewers, just what is being advertised remains elusive. Lee, drawing parallels between the novel and life-writing, reads this episode as an analogy to Mrs Dalloway’s understanding of life writing: “Everyone

in the novel has an unreadable life secreted inside, in layer upon layer of memory, emotion, habit, thought, and response, which the language of the novel bur-rows down into and excavates, but which can only be glimpsed on the surface in the simplified single letters by which we recognise each other externally.”

The ending of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star (1994) underscores the unknowability, in the eyes of a passersby, of the novel’s central protago-nist and first-person narrator, Edward Manners, as he looks at a photo of his seventeen-year-old student and lover, Luc, who had vanished:

I stood in front of him and repeated his name, though I knew he couldn’t see me, or recall the night he had taken my life in his arms. He gazed past me, as if in a truer kinship with the shiftless sea. A few late walkers passed us, and saw me vigilant in my huge unhappy overcoat; they didn’t know if it was the charts of tides and sunsets I was studying, or the named photos of the disappeared.

Indeed, Luc is as elusive to Manners as Manners is to the onlookers. The display of missing people with which the novel ends is foreshadowed when Luc was first introduced: Manners shows an acquaintance a folded sheet with a photo-booth image “as though I were searching for this boy and thought he might recognise the picture and give me a lead.”

Stories communicate to the reader in magical ways, enabling us to picture what the writer envisions without the machinery of actors and directors of the theater or film, as the narrator of McEwan’s Atone-ment relays in its early pages. Rehearsals for The Trials of Arabella have not been going well, and its thirteen-year-old first-time playwright Briony is frustrated by the lack of authorial control that the dramatist has—“The self-contained world she had drawn with clear and perfect lines had been defaced with the scribble of other minds, other needs; and time itself, so easily sectioned on papers into acts and scenes, was even now dribbling uncontrollably away”—preferring the story on the whole:

The title lettering, the illustrated cover, the pages bound—in that word alone she felt the attraction of the neat, limited and controllable form she had left behind when she decided to write a play. A story was direct and simple, allowing nothing to come between herself and her reader—no intermediaries with their private ambitions or incompetence, no pressures of time, no limits on resources. In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world; in a play you had to make do with what was available: no horses, no village streets, no

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Front cover for the 13 February 2015 issue of the London weekly that covers the publishing industry in Britain. Editor Philip Jones notes that women “dominate the trade—from recent Booker winners, to bestselling commercial fiction, to agenting,

to publishing, and finally (perhaps crucially) to readers. It is more of a wonder, therefore, that all of the chief executives running our major trade publishing businesses are men” (courtesy of Danny Arter).


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seaside. No curtain. It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled. You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high sum-mer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cob-bled road twisting away into the green shade . . .

Here, McEwan offers a kind of wink to the reader, a gesture toward the storyteller’s command and aware-ness of the potentials and the limitations of narrative. We might ask: is our guide to the story reliable in the telling of facts and/or her or his interpretations of them? Much later in the novel, just before the nov-el’s final section, we find the initials “BT / London, 1999.” Deep in the recesses of its first-person nar-rated postscript, McEwan reveals that our storyteller is Briony Tallis, now seventy-seven and dying of vascu-lar dementia. Her narrative operates as both a con-fession and an attempt at reparation of the damage that she had caused to and the possible happiness that she had prevented for Robbie, his mother the housekeeper, and Briony’s sister Cecilia when she gave a statement about a crime that she had not fully witnessed.

In 1940 Robbie had died of septicemia at Bray Dunes, and Cecilia was killed by a bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. Briony brings together the two characters through her fic-tion to make amends and to give it what a report of the actual events would lack: “sense or hope or satis-faction.” In Joe Wright’s 2007 adaptation of the novel, starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, and Saoirse Ronan, and featuring a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, the older Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) goes so far as to call her version not a “weakness or eva-sion, but a final act of kindness.” Briony’s account, however, was not wrought, as she suggests in her med-itation on the story and the play, without inhibition. Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, she is trapped in a cycle through which, until now and only perhaps, she has failed to escape: the dying Briony had rewritten it a half dozen times over the previous fifty-nine years, the latest version being the one that we had just read. She comes to realize that atonement is impos-sible for the writer, who has the ability to decide out-comes: “There is no one, no entity or higher form

that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.” The novel’s final lines beckon towards yet another rewriting: “I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them in my birthday celebration . . . Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It’s not impossible.” The “Not quite, not yet” is sug-gestive of further revisits. The novel, as we have seen here, seems ideal as a genre for offering commentary on life writing and for investigating both its possibili-ties and its limitations.

McEwan explores our own relationship with the subjects (Robbie and Cecilia) and the biogra-pher (Briony). His novel is concerned with the issue of objectivity, the reasons behind writing a biography, and the possible damage leveled at the biographical subject. Lee writes perceptively of the treatment of death in biography, suggesting that we “deal with” rather than give a straightforward report of the dead: “Doesn’t biography just state the facts? No, because there is a great deal invested, always, in the death of the subject, in terms of how the death relates to the life, how the subject behaves at their death, and how, if at all, the death can be interpreted. There are also tricky questions for the biographer about the tone of voice at the moment of the subject’s death.” The novelist faces these very same questions.

DLB 377: Twenty-First-Century British Novelists, of course, offers but a glimpse of the creative energies in British fiction today. But it is a lively glimpse. This volume includes reproductions of original manu-scripts of novels, including those by Jonathan Coe, David Lodge, Philip Pullman, Will Self, D. J. Taylor, and Sue Townsend. It takes us to lands as disparate as Lyra’s world, as described by Philip Pullman in the His Dark Materials trilogy (1999–2005), and as near as Margaret Thatcher’s England, the subject of many of these novelists, and it introduces us to characters as elusive as Julian Barnes’s Adrian Finn in The Sense of an Ending (2011) and as vivid as David Mitchell’s Sonmi~451 in Cloud Atlas (2004). Most important, it brings us closer to novelists who have, and are, shap-ing our literature and the way we understand our-selves and our world.

—Tom Ue

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Acknowledgments

This book was produced by Bruccoli Clark Lay-man, Inc. George Parker Anderson was the in-house editor. He was assisted by Catherine A. Allen, Desirae Gostlin, and Michele Patterson

Compositor is Tim Belshaw.Freelance copyeditor is Rebecca Mayo. Administrative support is provided by Giesela

F. Lubecke. Production manager is Janet E. Hill. Office manager is Kathy Lawler Merlette. Pipeline manager is James F. Tidd Jr. Systems manager is Gergely Uszkay. Library research was facilitated by staff at the

Thomas Cooper Library of the University of South Carolina, with special thanks to Elizabeth Sudduth and the rare-book department and circulation department head Tucker Taylor.

I thank the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London, espe-cially Philip Errington, Philip Horne, Julia Jordan, Charlotte Mitchell, John Mullan, Hugh Stevens, John Sutherland, and René Weis. Carol Bowen, Ste-phen Cadywold, Anita Garfoot, and James Phillips provided administrative help. I am grateful to Philip Schofield and my colleagues at the Bentham Proj-ect in the Faculty of Laws for their continuous sup-port and encouragement. Warm thanks are due to Jonathan Barnes, Michael Caines, David Fleischer, Vanessa Guignery, John Morton, Christine Bolus-Reichert, Pete Orford, David Ian Paddy, Ryan Rob-

erts, and Michael Saler for insightful conversations and practical help; to Roberts for compiling the list of works for my biography of Julian Barnes; and to Noel Brown, Fleischer and Orford for reading an early draft of the introduction. I am grateful to Alan Ashton-Smith, Barnes, Jordan, and Orford for their interviews, and to Jonathan Coe, David Mitchell, Philip Pullman, Will Self, and D. J. Taylor for their insights. Danny Arter, Su Blackwell, and Dex contrib-uted artwork; Coe, Pullman, Self, and Taylor, man-uscript pages; and Caines, Jeff Cottenden, John A. Little, Paddy, Kate Powling, Marlies Gabriele Prinzl, Roger Robinson, and many individuals and institu-tions, book jackets and photographs.

The editorial team at Bruccoli Clark Layman, Inc., in Columbia, South Carolina, deserves espe-cial thanks: Richard Layman gave me his vote of confidence, and Jim Tidd transcribed the recorded interviews with exemplary care. This Dictionary of Literary Biography would have been impossible with-out George Anderson, whose keen eye for details, scholarly precision, congeniality, and good humour have made its production a pleasure. My thanks go to Simon Bailey, Katie Guest, Peggy Perdue, Ste-ven Rothman, Catherine Scutt, Rob Wilkes and the staff of the following: the Bodleian Library and the Bodleian Education Library, University of Oxford; the British Library; Senate House Library, University of London; The Siobhan Dowd Trust; the Society of Authors; the Marilyn and Charles Baillie Special Col-lections Centre at the Toronto Reference Library; and the University College London Library.

—Tom Ue


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Twenty-First Century British Novelists

Documents

Transcript of Twenty-First Century British Novelists