Wain was born and matured in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, and attended St. John’s College, Oxford, gaining a B. A. during 1946 and M. A. during 1950. He was a Fereday Fellow of St John’s between 1946 and 1949. [1] He wrote his first novel Hurry on Down during 1953, a comic picaresque story about an unsettled university graduate who rejects the standards of conventional society. Other notable novels include Strike the father dead (1962), a tale of a jazzman’s rebellion against his conventional father, and Young shoulders (1982), winner of the Whitbread Prize, the tale of a young boy dealing with the death of loved ones.
Wain’s use of lower-case letters in the titles of his novels indicates his non-conventional manner. Wain was also a prolific poet and critic, with critical works on fellow Midlands writers Arnold Bennett, Samuel Johnson (for which he was awarded the 1974 James Tait Black Memorial Prize), and William Shakespeare. Among the other writers he has written works about are the Americans Theodore Roethke and Edmund Wilson. He himself was the subject of a bibliography by David Gerard. Wain taught at the University of Reading during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and during 1963 spent a term as professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London.
He was the first Fellow in creative arts at Brasenose College, Oxford (1971–1972), and was appointed a supernumerary fellow during 1973. In that same year, he was elected to the five-year post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford: some of his lectures are collected in his book Professing Poetry. Literary associations Wain was often referred to as one of the “Angry Young Men”, a term applied to 1950s writers such as John Braine, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe and Keith Waterhouse, radicals who opposed the British establishment and conservative elements of society at that time.
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Indeed, he did contribute to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos by writers associated with the philosophy, and a chapter of his novel, Hurry on Down, was excerpted in a popular paperback sampler, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. Nevertheless, it may be more accurate to associate Wain with “The Movement”, a group of post-war poets including Kingsley Amis, D. J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin. Amis and Larkin, good friends of Wain’s for a time, were also associated, with equal dubiousness, with the “angries”.
But, other than poetry, it is more accurate to refer to these three, as was sometimes done at the time, as “The New University Wits”, writers who desired to communicate rather than to experiment, and who often did so in a comic mode. However, they all became more serious after their initial work. Wain is still known for his poetry (for example An Apology for Understatement) and literary interests (see his work for “The Observer”), though his work now no longer is as popular as it was previously. Wain’s tutor at Oxford had been C.S. Lewis. He encountered, but did not believe he belonged to, Lewis’s literary acquaintances, the Inklings. Wain was a serious about literature as the Inklings, and believed as they did in the primacy of literature as communication, but as a modern realist writer he shared neither their conservative social beliefs nor their propensity for fantasy.
