Roy Fuller Writer and Society

When Roy Fuller died in 1991, there was general agreement: he was among the finest poets of his time, a novelist of importance, a man whose multi-stranded career - literary, cultural, professional - was exemplary. And he had been undervalued: he never quite, in his self deprecating phrase, 'caught on'. Early in 1990 Neil Powell approached him with a proposal to write a 'literary biography' - revaluing the work in the context of the life - and received his blessing. Drawing on unpublished letters and journals and on all the published sources, Roy Fuller: Writer and Society provides the first integrated account of an astonishing life's work. All the books of poetry are discussed, with close readings of vital individual poems; and the novels receive sustained attention. A fascinating and at times hilarious story of his other careers unfolds: as provincial schoolboy, solicitor's clerk, law student; wartime Navy radar engineer in England and East Africa; post-war solicitor and legal director of Woolwich Building Society; Oxford Professor of Poetry; BBC Governor; Chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel. This book offers an authoritative study of a major writer and a portrait of a wise, wry, complex and likable man in his volatile world.