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Edward Upward

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Occupation
  
Writer

Name
  
Edward Upward

Role
  
Novelist


Edward Upward Edward Upward An artistic vision at odds with his


Born
  
9 September 1903 (
1903-09-09
)
Romford, England

Died
  
February 13, 2009, Pontefract, United Kingdom

Education
  
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

Books
  
The Mortmere Stories, Journey to the border, The railway accident, A Renegade in Springt, The coming day and other

Edward Falaise Upward (9 September 1903 – 13 February 2009) was a British novelist and short story writer who, at the time of his death, was believed to have been the UK's oldest living author. His literary career spanned eighty years.

Edward Upward Obituary Edward Upward Books The Guardian

Biography

Edward Upward Edward Upward Telegraph

Upward was born on 9 September 1903 in Romford, Essex, the first child of Harold Arthur Upward (1874–1958) and Louisa "Isa" Upward (née Jones, 1869–1951). His siblings were John Mervyn Upward (1905–1999); Laurence Vaughan Upward (1909–1970), who suffered from schizophrenia; and Yolande Isa Upward (1911–2004).

In 1917, Upward was sent to Repton School, where he became a friend of Christopher Isherwood in the sixth form, and from 1922 to 1925, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where, after the arrival of Isherwood in 1923, they created the surreal world of Mortmere, an obscene parody of the middle and upper class characters they encountered in Cambridge. Upward was awarded Cambridge's Chancellor's Medal for English Verse in 1924, for his poem "Buddha". Through Isherwood, Upward met and befriended W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender.

After graduation Upward worked in various teaching jobs, and in 1932 he took up a post at Alleyn's School, Dulwich, where he remained for nearly thirty years. He also joined the Communist Party that year. In 1936 he married Hilda Percival (1909–1995), a fellow teacher and CPGB member. Their son Christopher Upward went on to become a notable orthographer. Upward remained committed to internationalism and socialism for the rest of his life, although he and his wife, Hilda, left the Communist Party in 1948, believing that it was no longer revolutionary.

Upward's first novel, Journey to the Border, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1938. It describes in poetic prose the rebellion of a private tutor against his employer and the menacing world of the 1930s, moving from a nightmarish state to one where he recognises that he must join the workers' movement.

A semi-autobiographical trilogy, The Spiral Ascent, was published in the 1960s and 1970s after Upward had retired from teaching and moved into the house where his parents used to live in Sandown on the Isle of Wight. The trilogy deals with a poet's struggle to combine artistic creativity with political commitment, including in its historical sweep the fight against the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, opposition to the leadership of the Communist Party in the 1940s and later involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

In the last decades of the twentieth century Upward returned to writing short stories, which were published, along with earlier works, by Enitharmon Press. In 2003 they celebrated his centenary by publishing selected short stories, edited by Alan Walker, as A Renegade in Springtime. In an interview with Nicholas Wroe, which appeared in The Guardian in the month before his hundredth birthday, Upward explained that the title A Renegade in Springtime "came from an idea for a story about Auden. I never wrote the story but the phrase stayed. The renegade is the one with a sense of reality and everyone else is too happy-go-lucky." His last story, Crommelin-Brown, was written in 2003, shortly before he turned 100.

In 2005 Upward was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded its Benson Medal.

On 13 February 2009, Upward died of a chest infection in Pontefract, Yorkshire, where he had relocated in 2004 to be close to his daughter. He was 105 years old.

In May 2016, the first major biography of Upward, Edward Upward: Art and Life by Peter Stansky, was published.

There is a large collection of literary papers and correspondence by Edward Upward in the British Library (Add MS 89002).

References

Edward Upward Wikipedia