Name Anthony West Role Author | Died December 27, 1987 | |
Born Anthony Panther West Fairfield
4 August 1914 ( 1914-08-04 ) Books H G Wells Aspects of a Life, Principles and persuasions Siblings G. P. Wells, Frank Wells, Anna-Jane Wells Cousins Alison Selford, Norman Macleod Similar People H G Wells, Rebecca West, Amber Reeves, Joseph Wells, Letitia Fairfield | ||
Parents Rebecca West, H. G. Wells | ||
Anthony West (4 August 1914 – 27 December 1987) was a British author and literary critic.
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John anthony west
Biography
West was the son of British authors Rebecca West and H. G. Wells. Born Anthony Panther West Fairfield, his parents never married, as Wells was already married to someone else, and remained so until after his intimate relationship with West ended (although they remained friends until his death in 1946).
In 1955, he wrote a novel Heritage, which was technically fiction, but which dealt with the trials of a boy who grows up largely neglected and ignored by his famous parents. This work was a thinly disguised autobiography (a roman à clef ). In it, his mother appeared much worse than his father, whom he admired all his life. She fell out with him over it, famously threatening to sue if the book was published in Britain. It was not published in Britain until 1984, after she had died. Another one of Anthony West's best-known books is H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life, a biography of his father.
A critically lauded author, he wrote novels, essays, and nonfiction works, and reviewed books for The New Yorker from the 1950s until the late 1970s. He won the Houghton Mifflin Award for his novel The Vintage (1949) (published in Britain as On a Dark Night), which Boucher and McComas praised as "a brilliantly terrifying exploration of the theme that each age creates its own peculiar species of hell and Devil". He is also known for works on history such as Elizabethan England, and All About the Crusades.