Anthony West (author)


Anthony West was an English author and literary critic.

Biography

West was born Anthony Panther West Fairfield, the son of British authors Rebecca West and H. G. Wells. His parents never married, as Wells was already married to someone else, and remained so until after his intimate relationship with West ended.
In 1955, Anthony West wrote a novel Heritage, which was technically fiction, but which dealt with the trials of a boy who grows up largely neglected and ignored by his famous parents. This work was a thinly disguised autobiography. In it, his mother appeared much worse than his father, whom he admired all his life. She fell out with him over it, famously threatening to sue if the book was published in Britain. It was not published in Britain until 1984, after she had died. Another one of Anthony West's best-known books is H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life, a biography of his father.
A critically lauded author, he wrote novels, essays, and nonfiction works, and reviewed books for The New Yorker from the 1950s until the late 1970s. He won the Houghton Mifflin Award for his novel The Vintage , which Boucher and McComas praised as "a brilliantly terrifying exploration of the theme that each age creates its own peculiar species of hell and Devil". He is also known for works on history such as Elizabethan England, and All About the Crusades.
In 1937, West married Katharine Church; the couple had one son and one daughter but divorced in 1952. He later married Lily Emmet.
He died at home in Stonington, Connecticut at the age of 73 after suffering a stroke.

Works