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Malcolm Bradbury

Author profile

born

September 07, 1932 in Sheffield, The United Kingdom

died

November 27, 2000

gender

male

genre

Literature & Fiction

About this author

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Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic. He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a 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. His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities – the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors – which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.

H...more Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic. He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a 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. His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities – the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors – which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.

He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the world-renowned MA in Creative Writing course, which Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro both attended. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995. Malcolm Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to Literature.

Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow 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.

He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy, The Gravy Train, the sequel The Gravy Train Goes East (which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His last television script was for Dalziel and Pascoe series 5 Produced by Andy Rowley. The episode 'Foreign Bodies was screened on BBC One on July 15 2000.(less)

combine editions
Books by Malcolm Bradbury

Average rating: 3.74 · 1,771 ratings · 187 reviews · 67 distinct works

	The History Man 3.55 avg rating — 221 ratings — published 1975 — 12 editions	My rating:
	Eating People is Wrong 3.42 avg rating — 108 ratings — published 1959 — 7 editions	My rating:
	The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories by Malcolm Bradbury, Various 3.65 avg rating — 66 ratings — published 1987 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Rates Of Exchange 3.67 avg rating — 61 ratings — published 1983 — 10 editions	My rating:
	To the Hermitage 3.60 avg rating — 53 ratings — published 2001 — 5 editions	My rating:
	Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 by Malcolm Bradbury (Editor), James Walter McFarlane (Editor), James McFarlane (Editor) 3.77 avg rating — 35 ratings — published 1978 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Doctor Criminale 3.40 avg rating — 48 ratings — published 1992 — 7 editions	My rating:
	Cuts 3.32 avg rating — 25 ratings — 7 editions	My rating:
	The Modern British Novel 3.82 avg rating — 17 ratings — published 1993 — 3 editions	My rating:
	The Atlas of Literature 3.89 avg rating — 18 ratings — 4 editions	My rating:

More books by Malcolm Bradbury…

Quotes by Malcolm Bradbury

“Most beds aren't as intimate as people think they are.”
― Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man

tags: intimacy

3 people liked it

“Maybe one reason so many people have so many problems is that there are so many other people with so many solutions." (Love on a Gunboat")”
― Malcolm Bradbury, The After Dinner Game: Three Plays for Television

2 people liked it

“Marriage, [...], the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.”
― Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man

tags: marriage