Wain, John Barrington
Wain, John Barrington ( 1925 – 94 ),poet, critic, and novelist, born in Stoke-on-Trent and educated at Newcastle under Lyme and St John's College, Oxford. He lectured at Reading, 1947 – 55 , and was professor of poetry at Oxford 1973 – 8 . His first novel, Hurry on down ( 1953 ), is an episodic and picaresque account of the career of Charles Lumley , who, on leaving university, rejects his lower-middle-class origins by working as window-cleaner, crook, hospital orderly, chauffeur, and bouncer. It has been linked with the novels of W. Cooper , K. Amis , and J. Braine as a manifestation of the spirit of the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the 1950s. Other novels include The Contenders ( 1958 ), A Travelling Woman ( 1959 ), and Strike the Father Dead ( 1962 ), again a novel about a rebellious young man, who runs away from school and the expectations of his ‘red-brick’...
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