Stephen Spender

Seven years after Stephen Spender's death, John Sutherland offers the authorised life of this brilliant, but famously enigmatic, man.

Sutherland's account ranges from the depiction of Spender's cosmopolitan family (and the dominant influence of his archetypal Victorian father) via Oxford, to the breakaway years in 1930s Weimar Germany, where his comrades in liberated exile were W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. We follow him through the war as Britain's most famous fireman, to the postwar years of international celebrity - a celebrity which provoked some animosity; Spender's reputation is among the most unfairly contested of its time but of all the great writers of the 1930s he lived longest and lived most fully.

Stephen Spender was, and still is, a controversial figure. One thing is, however, irrefutable. Anyone who was anyone, in literary or cultural terms, crossed his path: the pageant of his friends, acquaintances (and, sometimes, antagonists) includes Isaiah Berlin, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Cyril Connolly.

A wonderfully lively read, with many never-before-seen photographs from the family collection, this biography offers not just a full, and revealing depiction of Spender, but also the grounds for reassessing his contribution to twentieth century life and letters in Britain and America. As well as being a colleague of Spender's during the 1970s, John Sutherland has had unhindered access to archive material and living witnesses to Spender's career. Stephen Spender is a biography of a remarkable writer - a hero of the 1930s - and a panoramic portrait of the troubled century which he inhabited: as poet, cultural ambassador and man of letters.