Anthony West (author)

Anthony West (4 August 1914 – 27 December 1987) was a British author and literary critic. He was the son of British authors Rebecca West and H. G. Wells. Anthony West's best-known book is H.G. Wells: Aspects of a Life, a biography of his father. Born Anthony Panther West Fairfield, his parents never wed. In 1955, he wrote a novel "Heritage", which was technically a fiction, but which dealt with the trials of boy who grows up largely neglected and ignored by his famous parents. This was obviously disguised autobiography, (a roman à clef ) as any reader would understand. 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. See: 1.4 Relationship with her son. It was not published in Britain until 1984, after she died. (See "Works" below).

A critically lauded author, he wrote novels, essays and nonfiction works, and reviewed books for The New Yorker from the 1950s till the late 1970. He was a winner of 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.