Philip Larkin

Born on August 9, 1922, in Coventry, England, Larkin was the son of Sydney Larkin, the city treasurer, a man who kept a statuette of Hitler on his mantelpiece and attended two Nuremberg rallies. Larkin's childhood, by his own account, was unhappy: he stammered, was severely nearsighted, and described his upbringing as "a forgotten boredom." He read English at St John's College, Oxford, where he befriended Kingsley Amis, and published his first collection, The North Ship (1945), heavily influenced by Yeats. Two early novels followed, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), before he abandoned fiction altogether. He spent his adult life as a librarian, working for thirty years at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, a provincial post he never left and seemed to relish for its very remoteness. The Less Deceived (1955) established his reputation; The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) confirmed him as the defining English poet of the postwar era. His verse, meticulous in form, bleak in outlook, laced with dark humor, made art from diminished expectations. "Deprivation," he said, "is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth." He never married, maintaining long simultaneous relationships with several women. He was offered the Poet Laureateship in 1984 but declined. He died of esophageal cancer on December 2, 1985, in Hull, at sixty-three.

At Oxford in 1943, Larkin secretly invented a lady novelist named Brunette Coleman and wrote her a girls' boarding school pastiche, Trouble at Willow Gables. He filed the manuscript away at Hull's Brynmor Jones Library, and it did not surface publicly until after his death, when his letters and first biography appeared.