John le Carré

British · 1931 to 2020

Born David John Moore Cornwell on October 19, 1931, in Poole, Dorset, the second son of a glamorous con-man father, Ronnie Cornwell, who consorted with the Kray twins and was twice jailed for fraud, and a mother who left the family when he was five and whom he did not see again until he was twenty-one. He was sent to St Andrew's preparatory school and then to Sherborne, which he hated, leaving early to read German at the University of Bern, then completing his degree at Lincoln College, Oxford in 1956 after his father's bankruptcy briefly forced him out. He taught French and German at Eton for two years before joining MI5 in 1958, transferring to MI6 in 1960 under the cover of Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn. While serving, he wrote his first novels under the pen name John le Carré because Foreign Office staff were forbidden to publish under their own names; he later said he had taken the name from a shop sign. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller and allowed him to leave the secret services for writing. His career as an officer ended in 1964 when Kim Philby betrayed British agents to the KGB. Across more than twenty novels, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1979), A Perfect Spy (1986), and The Constant Gardener (2001), he gave the espionage novel a moral seriousness it had not previously known. Philip Roth called A Perfect Spy "the best English novel since the war." He died on December 12, 2020, in Cornwall, aged eighty-nine.