- Storey, David
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▪ British writerin full David Malcolm Storeyborn July 13, 1933, Wakefield, Yorkshire, Eng.English novelist and playwright whose brief professional rugby career and lower-class background provided material for the simple, powerful prose that won him early recognition as an accomplished storyteller and dramatist.After completing his schooling at Wakefield at age 17, Storey signed a 15-year contract with the Leeds Rugby League Club; he also won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art in London. When the conflict between rugby and painting became too great, he paid back three-quarters of his signing-on fee, and Leeds let him go.Storey's first published novel, This Sporting Life (1960), is his best-known. It is the story of a professional rugby player and his affair with his widowed landlady. Storey wrote the script for a film based on the novel and directed by Lindsay Anderson in 1966. Other novels followed: Flight into Camden (1960), about an independent young woman who defies her mining family; Radcliffe (1963), about the struggle for power in a homosexual relationship; Pasmore (1972), on the regeneration of a man who had given himself up for lost; and Saville (1976, Booker Prize), an autobiographical account of the breaking away of a coal miner's son from village life. Later novels include A Prodigal Child (1982), Present Times (1984), A Serious Man (1998), As It Happened (2002), and Thin-Ice Skater (2004).Storey also established a reputation as a playwright. His first play, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton (performed 1966), won immediate recognition. In Celebration (performed 1969; filmed 1974), directed by Anderson, returned to a recurring Storey theme: the impossibility of making a clean break with one's lower-class roots and background. Later plays include The Contractor (performed 1969); Home (1970), set in an insane asylum; The Changing Room (1971), set in the changing room of a semiprofessional rugby team; Life Class (1974), about a failed art master; Mother's Day (1976); Sisters (1978); Early Days (1980); and The March on Russia (1989).
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Universalium. 2010.
