John Braine
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John Braine | |
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Braine in 1962
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Born | Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England |
13 April 1922
Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. |
Nationality | English |
Occupation | Novelist |
Known for | Room at the Top (1957) |
John Gerard Braine (13 April 1922 – 28 October 1986)[1] was an English novelist. Braine is usually listed among the angry young men, a loosely defined group of English writers who emerged on the literary scene in the 1950s.
Contents
Biography
John Braine was born in the Westgate area of central Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire. The family later moved to the suburb of Thackley on the northern edge of the city. Braine left St. Bede's Grammar School at 16 and worked in a shop, a laboratory and a factory before becoming, after the war, a librarian in Bingley, a small town 5 miles (8 km) up the Aire Valley and at Darton in 1954 where locals put his inattention down to his spending his time writing his first novel.[2]
Although he wrote 12 works of fiction, Braine is chiefly remembered today for his first novel, Room at the Top (1957). The novel was conceived when he was being treated for tuberculosis in a hospital near the Yorkshire Dales town of Grassington. He stated that his favourite author was Guy de Maupassant and that Room at the Top was based on Bel Ami, but that "the critics didn't pick it up".[citation needed]
Room at the Top was turned into a successful 1959 film, with Laurence Harvey as Joe Lampton and featuring an Oscar–winning performance by Simone Signoret. In September 2012, BBC television broadcast a two-part dramatisation that had been delayed because of a dispute over copyright. Matthew McNulty was in the lead role.
After achieving literary success, Braine moved to the south of England, living for a time in Woking. He wrote several more novels, including Life at the Top, a sequel to Room at the Top. His 1968 novel The Crying Game is set in London and captures some of the atmosphere of the 'Swinging Sixties' (it is not related to the 1992 film of the same name). His 1974 book Writing a Novel was a guide for aspiring novelists.
Braine was mildly left-wing in his youth, but, like his contemporaries (and fellow "angry young men") Kingsley Amis and John Wain, he later moved to the political right and supported America's involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1967, Braine, Robert Conquest, Amis and several others signed a controversial letter to The Times titled "Backing for U.S. Policies in Vietnam", supporting the US government in Vietnam.[3]
Braine was married to Helen Wood and had four children. They separated in the early 1980s with Wood moving to Shropshire with her two youngest children.[4] He died from a gastric haemorrhage in 1986 at age 64.[1]
Select bibliography
Fiction
- Room at the Top (1957) Reissued in 2013 by Valancourt Books
- The Vodi (1959) Reissued in 2013 by Valancourt Books
- Life at the Top (1962) Reissued in 2015 by Valancourt Books
- The Jealous God (1964)
- The Crying Game (1968) (not related to the 1992 film of the same title)
- Stay with Me Till Morning (1970) (U.S. title: "The View from Tower Hill")
- The Queen of a Distant Country (1972)
- The Pious Agent (1975)
- Waiting for Sheila (1976)
- One and Last Love (1981)
- The Two of Us (1984)
- These Golden Days (1985)
- Man at the Top (Thames Television, 1970-1): five scripts for the first series of this drama based on Braine's character Joe Lampton[5]
Non-fiction
- A Personal Record (Monday Club, 1968)
- Writing a Novel (1974)
- J.B. Priestley (1978)
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ John Wakeman, World Authors 1950–1970 : a companion volume to Twentieth Century Authors. New York : H. W. Wilson Company, 1975. ISBN 0824204190. (pp. 444-48).
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ See the review at DVDCompare, of the 2010 UK DVD release: DVDCompare review
External links
Wikiquote has quotations related to: John Braine |
- John Braine – bibliography of first editions
- John Braine archival collection at Lua error in Module:Wd at line 405: invalid escape sequence near '"^'.
- Articles with short description
- Use dmy dates from June 2013
- Articles with hCards
- Articles with unsourced statements from January 2015
- 1922 births
- 1986 deaths
- Writers from Bradford
- People from Bingley
- People from Woking
- People educated at St. Bede's Grammar School
- Booker authors' division
- 20th-century English novelists
- English male novelists
- 20th-century English male writers