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Sir Malcolm Bradbury (September 7, 1932–November 27, 2000) was a 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, 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 UEA Creative Writing Course, which was 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.
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?, a parody of travel books, dealing with the fictional Eastern European country that is the setting for his novel Rates of Exchange. It is .
Malcolm Bradbury was knighted in 2000.
Bibliography (incomplete)
- Eating People is Wrong (1962)
- Stepping Westward (1968)
- The History Man (1975)
- Rates of Exchange
- To the Hermitage
Quote
- If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments&madash;we'd have the Ten Suggestions
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