Literary Career
He wrote his first novel Hurry on Down in 1953, a comic picaresque story about an unsettled university graduate who rejects the standards of conventional society. Other notable novels include Strike the Father Dead (1962), a tale of a jazzman's rebellion against his conventional father, and Young shoulders (1982), winner of the Whitbread Prize, the tale of a young boy dealing with the death of loved ones.
Wain was also a prolific poet and critic, with critical works on fellow Midlands writers Arnold Bennett, Samuel Johnson (for which he was awarded the 1974 James Tait Black Memorial Prize), and William Shakespeare. Among the other writers about whom he has written are the Americans Theodore Roethke and Edmund Wilson. He himself was the subject of a bibliography by David Gerard. He was a literary lion in his day, but the unpleasant remarks about him by Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin in their posthumous letters seem to have rubbished his reputation.
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