It’s the birthday of English author John Barrington Wain (b. 1925 – d. 1994), whose work is associated with the anti-establishment literary movement in 1950s England known as the Angry Young Men. (This movement parallels the Beat Generation found in the U.S. that same decade.) Other AYM authors included folks like Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, John Braine, and John Osborne; it was Osborne’s play, Look Back in Anger (1956), that gave rise to the phrase itself, and Wain resented being associated with it. Which seems appropriate. Because he was angry. (Okay, actually he wasn’t angry: read on.)

Wain was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England, and went to St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1943; poor eyesight kept him out of the military. His tutor at Oxford was C.S. Lewis, with whom he got on famously. They would get together to drink beer and talk literature, and he even attended Lewis’ and JRR Tolkien’s literary group, The Inklings. Wain met Larkin and Amis while at Oxford, but in contrast to the morose Larkin and the whiny, irritable Amis, Wain was an outgoing, affable sort of guy.

From 1947 to 1955, Wain was a lecturer at the University of Reading, publishing his first and most highly acclaimed novel in 1953, Hurry on Down. In this comic novel, Oxford graduate Charles Lumley rejects his conventional middle class upbringing and tries to find himself through a series of lower class jobs ranging from window cleaner to nightclub bouncer. Amis’ novel, Lucky Jim, came out the next year in somewhat the same vein. (I read Lucky Jim years ago and enjoyed it purely as a comic novel, unaware that Amis was an AYM. This was near the end of my CYR, Clueless Young Reader, stage, but before my EMPWFAARFM, Exhausted Middle-aged Parent Who Falls Asleep After Reading Five Minutes, stage.)

Wain was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1973 to 1978 and in addition to several more novels (e.g., Strike the Father Dead, 1962, and Young Shoulders, 1982, winner of the Whitbread Prize) published several books each of poetry and short stories. He was also a respected critic and wrote an award-winning biography of Samuel Johnson (1974). He married three times: the first marriage ended in divorce, his second wife died after many years of marriage (they had three sons), and he was survived by his third wife. He was appointed a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 1983.

Fun but also annoying fact: if you’re nosing around online and come across John Wain’s page at wikivisually.com, you will find information about Wain on the left and images of John Wayne, American cowboy actor, on the right. If Wain hadn’t been an AYM already, this would surely have been enough to turn him.

Have an affable sort of Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data, which is to say, always be wary of sources beginning with “wiki.”