Uzbekistan state university of world languages english language faculty №2 Course work Theme: John Wain- his life and work

1.1 John Wain’s biography
Firstly, before moving to the main details about the author we will know briefly about him. John Wain was born in 1925 in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. He attended St John’s College, Oxford, earning a BA in 1946 and an MA in 1950. A creative author and man of letters, Wain wrote poetry, novels, criticism, and biographies during a writing profession that spanned more than forty years. He worked for most of his life as a temporary journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio. Wain was born and raised up in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, the son of a dentist, Arnold Wain, and his wife Annie, née Turner. He had an older sister and a younger brother, Noel. After joining Newcastle under Lyme High School, he entered St. John's College, Oxford, gaining a first in his BA in 1946 and an MA in 1950. He was a Fereday Fellow of St John's between 1946 and 1949. On 4 July 1947, Wain married Marianne Uffenheimer they divorced in 1956. He then married Eirian Mary Jame , deputy director of the recorded sound department of the British Council, on 1 January 1960. They had three sons and lived mainly in Wolvercote, Oxford. Wain married his third wife, Patricia Adams, an art teacher, in 1989. He died in Oxford on 24 May 1994. Wain was often referred to as one of the "Angry Young Men", a term applied to 1950s writers such as John Braine, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe and Keith Waterhouse, as radicals who opposed the British establishment and conservative elements of society at that time.
The writer Norman Lewis, who has lived much longer than most British writers, once exclaimed that he was the only citizen he knew who could walk into a room with a group of people and leave it sometime later without let no one notice that he had been there. There was some truth in the statement that it didn't matter; it says so much more about his modesty that failing to get attention was the only claim he made.¹
He started out teaching at the University of Reading, but in 1953 left to pursue writing full-time. Wain’s first novel, Hurry on Down was a bestseller and launched Wain’s career as a novelist. The book ran into numerous hardcover printings and was often republished as a Penguin paperback; it is credited with paving the way for later British classics of the 1950s, including Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) and John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957). Wain followed his first novel with a number of other novels and short story collections, including Living in the Present (1955), The Contenders (1958), A Travelling Woman (1959), Strike the Father Dead (1962), The Young Visitors (1965), Nuncle, and Other Stories (1965), and Death of the Hind Legs and Other Stories (1966). A number of modern critics felt some of these works represented a falling-off from Wain’s positive debut novel, but his next novel, The Smaller Sky (1967), was well received, and is arguably Wain’s masterpiece. The Smaller Sky tells the story of a man overwhelmed by the stresses of his life, who seeks refuge beneath the ‘smaller sky’ of Paddington rail station. Among his later fiction, A Winter in the Hills (1970) and Young Shoulders (1982) were particularly well regarded; the latter novel won the Whitbread Award.
In 1973, Wain was appointed the first Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, and the following year his biography of Samuel Johnson won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His services to literature were recognized in 1984 when he was awarded a CBE. In the late 1980s, he began his ‘Oxford Trilogy’ with Where the Rivers Meet (1988), and the final volume, Hungry Generations, was published shortly after his death in 1994. ²