Wild Garden

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A01=Angus Wilson
Author_Angus Wilson
Category=DNBL1
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Faber Finds
Inspiration
Psychoanalysis
Writers

Product details

  • ISBN 9780571248988
  • Weight: 169g
  • Dimensions: 126 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 19 Feb 2009
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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The Wild Garden is both an autobiographical essay on the creative process and a remarkable personal account of the circumstances surrounding the nervous crisis that impelled Angus Wilson to become a writer at the age of thirty-six. Examining specific incidents, characters, places and recurring symbols in his life and work, notably the wild garden itself, Wilson analyses the links between his own life crisis and the theme of liberation by self-realization that was to be central to all his novels.

'The Wild Garden is, quite simply, one of the finest accounts of the creative process by a recent writer that I know. Here Angus Wilson looks at the springs of writing in a way that all writers can recognize, and all readers appreciate as a way into the brilliant, discovering imagination that lay behind his major novels.' Malcolm Bradbury

Sir Angus Wilson CBE was born in Bexhill, Sussex, in 1913, the youngest of six boys, and grew up in a series of residential hotels after his family ran through their inheritance. After Westminster School and Oxford University, he joined the British Museum Library. In World War II, he worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, where the stress caused a breakdown and he took up writing as therapy. After the war, he returned to the British Museum and replaced 300,000 books that had been destroyed. Following the success of his second novel, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), he gave up his job to dedicate time to writing. Homosexuality was still illegal, yet Wilson always wrote freely about his world; some libraries refused to stock his novels. Wilson became a Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia from 1966 to 1978, and jointly with Malcolm Bradbury, established their ground-breaking MA in Creative Writing in 1970. He always insisted that his life companion Tony Garrett was acknowledged as his partner (Garrett was fired from his job as a probation officer). He and Tony left England for France in 1985, but Wilson's illness forced their return. The Royal Literary Fund supported Wilson in his final years. He died in 1991.

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