Life and Career
Wharton was born as Michael Bernhard Nathan, the son of a businessman of German-Jewish origin, at Shipley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire ("Wharton" was the maiden name of his mother). Wharton was educated at Bradford Grammar School and Lincoln College, Oxford. His career at Oxford was undistinguished, partly because he spent his time writing Sheldrake, a novel that had little success when published in 1958. After Oxford, Wharton served in the Royal Artillery from 1940 to 1946. He then worked for the BBC as a producer and scriptwriter, but left in 1956.
His two volumes of quasi-autobiography, The Missing Will and A Dubious Codicil, combined his fantasy world with the mundane reality of the life as a jobbing journalist. Wharton married three times. His daughter and literary executor, Jane Wharton, works as a psychotherapist.
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