JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY (1947)

Journalist and critic whose romantic and biographical approach to literature ran counter to the leading critical tendencies of his day.

He wrote at least 40 books and a large body pf journalistic works in which his pronounced -though changeable- views on social, political and religious questions were constantly before the public.

He was the husband of short-story writer Katherine Mansfield and a close associate of D.H. Lawrence both of whom influenced his development as a writer.

During World War I the Murrys and Lawrences were neighbors in Cornwall and something of the relationship between the two couples appears in Lawrence´s Women in Love.

Murry also appears, harshly lampooned, as the character Burlap in Aldous Huxley´s Point Counter Point.

Murry began his career as editor of Rhythm while at Brasenose College, Oxford. He was editor of Athenaeum (1919-21) and founding editor of Adelphi (1923-48) both literary magazines.

As a pacifist he edited Peace News during World War II and ran a Christian community on a farm near Colchester with the help of conscientious objectors. After the war learning of the Nazi concentration camp atrocities he renounced his former total pacifism.

Among his numerous critical works are studies of Mansfield (Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Portraits, 1949) and Lawrence (Son of Woman, the Story of D.H. Lawrence, 1931) as well as several works on Keats.

As a man who believed that knowledge of a writer´s private life was necessary to an understanding of his works, he made his autobiographical Between Two Worlds (1935) strikingly revealing about his own.