Roy Fuller: Writer and Society

by Neil Powell

When Roy Fuller died in 1991, there was general 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 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 Drawing on unpublished letters and journals and on all the published sources, Roy Writer and Society provides the first integrated account of an astonishing life's work.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 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.

330 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1996