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Sir Malcolm Bradbury September 7, 1932 - November 27, 2000, was an British author and academic.
Born into a working class family in Sheffield, and educated at the University of Leicester, Queen Mary College, London, and the
University of Manchester, Malcolm Bradbury made
most of his career at the University of East
Anglia, where he was Professor of American Studies until his retirement in 1995. His
greatest achievement there was the foundation, with Angus Wilson, of the
first postgraduate course in creative writing to gain success and respect in the UK; many successful writers have graduated from this
course, for example Ian McEwan.
Malcolm Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published
books on Evelyn Waugh and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern
fiction, both British and American. However, he is best known to a wider public as a novelist. His best known novel, The History Man
(1975), set in the fictional University of Watermouth, was a dark satire of academic life in the then fashionable newer
universities of England; it was later made into a successful television serial. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are
consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language.
He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as
Anything More Would Be Greedy and The Gravy Train, and adapting
novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott
on the Landscape, Alison
Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green
Man.
In 1986 he wrote a short humorous book titled Why Come to Slaka?. It dealt with the fictional Eastern European
country that is the setting for his novel Rates of Exchange. It is a parody of travel books.
Malcolm Bradbury was knighted in 2000.
List of novels by Malcolm Bradbury (incomplete)
- Eating People is Wrong (1962)
- Stepping Westward (1968)
- The History Man (1975)
- Rates of Exchange
- To the Hermitage
If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments — we'd have the Ten Suggestions - Malcolm
Bradbury.
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