Biography
John Braine was born in Bingley, near Bradford, Yorkshire. He left St. Bede's Grammar School at 16 and worked in a shop, a laboratory and a factory before becoming, after the war, a librarian. Although he wrote twelve works of fiction, Braine is chiefly remembered today for his first novel, Room at the Top (1957), which was also turned into a successful film in 1959, with Laurence Harvey starring as Joe Lampton. In September 2012, BBC television finally broadcast a two-part dramatisation that had been delayed because of a dispute over copyright. Matthew McNulty was in the lead role
Following his literary success, John Braine moved to the south of England, living for a time in Woking. His 1968 novel, The Crying Game, is set in London and captures some of the atmosphere of the 'Swinging Sixties'. (It is not related to the 1992 film of the same name). Mildly left-wing in youth, he later moved (like his contemporaries Kingsley Amis and John Wain) to the political right, and supported America's involvement in Vietnam. He married Helen Wood and had four children. He died in 1986, aged 64.
Read more about this topic: John Braine
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“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)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)