Biography
He was born in Bedford in 1920, the son of Edwin Morris and Mignon Vansittart. He was a distant cousin of Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs between 1930 and 1938. Peter Vansittart was educated at Marlborough House School, Haileybury College and Worcester College, Oxford, although he spent only a year at Oxford and did not graduate. He worked as a schoolteacher at progressive schools — most notably Burgess Hill School, Hampstead — for 25 years before becoming a full-time writer. He wrote a novel about his time as a schoolteacher called Broken Canes. For many years he made money by letting rooms in a house in Hampstead which he bought for £200 in cash from an acquaintance in a pub in the 1940s. This inspired his novel Landlord. After living in London for much of his life, Vansittart moved to Suffolk to a house inherited from his mother.
He died on October 4, 2008 at Ipswich Hospital aged 88.
Read more about this topic: Peter Vansittart
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)