Richard Hughes

British · 1900 to 1976

Richard Arthur Warren Hughes was born on April 19, 1900, in Weybridge, Surrey, the son of a civil servant and a mother who had grown up in Jamaica, the island that would eventually give her son his most famous book. He was educated at Charterhouse and then Oriel College, Oxford, where he fell in with Robert Graves and co-edited Oxford Poetry, and where his early plays and verse marked him out as a prodigy: The Sisters' Tragedy reached the West End's Royal Court Theatre the year he graduated, and in 1924 he wrote A Comedy of Danger for the BBC, often credited as the first play composed specifically for radio. His debut novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, appeared in 1929 under two titles at once, The Innocent Voyage in America and its lasting name in Britain, and its unsentimental portrait of children swept up by pirates made his reputation before he had turned thirty. In 1932 he married the painter Frances Bazley, and two years later they settled at Castle House in Laugharne on the Welsh coast, where Hughes helped draw the young poet Dylan Thomas to the town; Thomas wrote part of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog while staying under Hughes's roof. In Hazard, his 1938 novel of a steamship battling a Caribbean hurricane, drew on the same fascination with people under extreme natural pressure. He spent the Second World War at a desk in the Admiralty, then a decade writing film scripts for Ealing Studios, before returning to fiction with the two completed volumes of an intended trilogy, The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1973), tracing Europe's slide toward war. He was appointed OBE in 1946 and served for years as churchwarden of Llanfihangel y Traethau, near his final home. He died at Ynys, Gwynedd, on April 28, 1976, at seventy six, the trilogy's third volume unfinished on his desk.