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Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, John Braine, Colin Wilson, John Wain – five names instantly redolent of the 1950s and the Angry Young Men phenomenon. However, as Humphrey Carpenter explores with relish, the suggestion that these and other writers, tagged in the same way, formed a homogeneous cadre of rebellion is false and is much more the product of media myth-making than anything else. Indeed, the Angry Young Men could hardly have been a more diverse group, sundered by ability, achievement, beliefs and outlook.
This was the sort of book Humphrey Carpenter excelled at, with The Inklings, Secret Gardens, Geniuses Together, The Brideshead Generation and The Angry Young Men almost making the category of group literary biography his own. This was his last in the idiom and probably the funniest.
Humphrey Carpenter was born and educated in Oxford, and attended the Dragon School and Keble College. He was a well-known biographer and children’s writer, and worked previously as a producer at the BBC. He wrote biographies of J. R. R. Tolkien, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Ezra Pound, C. S. Lewis and Dennis Potter. Among his many books for children…
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