Bradbury, Malcolm (1932-2000), was a noted British novelist, literary critic, and teacher. He became known for a series of comic novels that actually dealt with serious issues. Many of these novels satirized British academic life.
Bradbury first gained fame for his comic novel Eating People Is Wrong (1959). His second novel, Stepping Westward (1965), is based on his experiences teaching at an American university. Perhaps his most popular academic novel is The History Man (1975). Bradbury’s other novels include Rates of Exchange (1982), Why Come to Slaka? (1986), My Strange Quest for Mensonge, also known as Mensonge: Structuralism’s Hidden Hero (1987), Doctor Criminale (1992), and To the Hermitage (2000).
Bradbury was one of the leading British literary critics of his time. His critical essays were collected in such works as The Social Context of Modern English Literature (1971), Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel (1973), The Modern American Novel (1983), From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (1991), The Modern British Novel (1993), and Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel (1995). Bradbury also wrote studies of the modern writers Saul Bellow and Evelyn Waugh. He edited studies of E. M. Forster and was involved in writing film and television scripts. His television work inspired his short novel Cuts (1987).
Malcolm Stanley Bradbury was born in Sheffield, England, on Sept. 7, 1932. He studied at the University College of the University of Leicester and received a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Manchester. Bradbury became professor of American studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, in 1970, and founded the creative writing school at the university the same year. Graduates of the program included the English novelists Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan. Queen Elizabeth II knighted Bradbury in 2000, and he became known as Sir Malcolm Bradbury. He died on Nov. 27, 2000.
