Early Life
John Cornwell was born in East Ham, London, the son of Sidney Arthur Cornwell and Kathleen Egan Cornwell.
Raised as a Roman Catholic, Cornwell entered the junior seminary, Cotton College, in 1953 intending to become a priest. He later wrote a memoir on his five years at Cotton. He continued to the senior seminary, Oscott College, Sutton Coldfield, in 1958.
After leaving the seminary, in the 1960s Cornwell studied at Oxford and Cambridge, graduating in 1964 in English Language and Literature. While studying at Christ's College, Cambridge as a post-graduate student, he abandoned Catholicism and became an agnostic. He married a Catholic woman, however, who brought up their children as Catholics, and eventually, twenty years after leaving the Catholic faith, he returned to it.
After leaving Cambridge, Cornwell taught in London schools, and at McMaster University, Ontario. He also spent time working for The Observer in London, being responsible for the newspaper's foreign syndication service. His first two books were novels: The Spoiled Priest, and Seven Other Demons. Two decades later he published a third novel, Strange Gods. In 1973 he published a critical biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge, Poet and Revolutionary, 1772–1804.
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