Bradbury, Sir Malcolm Stanley

▪ 2001

      British author, critic, and university professor (b. Sept. 7, 1932, Sheffield, Eng.—d. Nov. 27, 2000, Norwich, Eng.), wrote novels, literary criticism, biographies, short stories, and plays and served for more than 35 years on the faculties of three British universities. Considered one of the finest contemporary satirists, he often focused on academia in such novels as Eating People Is Wrong (1959), Stepping Westward (1965), and The History Man (1975). In the latter, regarded by many as his best novel, he satirized the academic environment of the 1960s in the person of a left-wing college lecturer for whom teaching was primarily a means of manipulating the minds of his students. Bradbury's later novels included Rates of Exchange (1983), Doctor Criminale (1992), and To the Hermitage (2000). Among his other works were the collection of short stories Who Do You Think You Are? (1976), The Social Context of Modern English Literature (1971), Modernism (1976; coedited with James McFarlane), The Modern American Novel (1983), and The Modern British Novel (1993). He also wrote many studies of literary figures and adapted for television works by such authors as Alison Lurie and Kingsley Amis. Bradbury gained his undergraduate degree in English from University College, Leicester (now University of Leicester), in 1953 and earned a doctorate in American Studies at the University of Manchester in 1962. He began his teaching career at the University of Hull in 1959, and he taught English at the University of Birmingham from 1962 to 1965. From 1965 until his retirement in 1995, he served as professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia; there, in 1970, he developed Britain's first master's-level program in creative writing. Among his students were Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, both of whom later won Britain's Booker Prize.

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