P. H. Newby
Percy Howard Newby, born on June 25, 1918, in Crowborough, East Sussex, England, was a notable British novelist known for his exploration of moral dilemmas and spiritual themes in his works. His upbringing involved frequent relocations due to his father's business, which fostered his early passion for literature and writing. After a brief stint in education, Newby served in the army during World War II, where he taught English in Egypt, an experience that profoundly influenced his worldview and literary output. His first novel, *A Journey to the Interior*, marked the beginning of a successful writing career characterized by a deep engagement with character-driven narratives.
Newby gained widespread recognition with his landmark novel *Something to Answer For*, published in 1968, which won the inaugural Booker Prize and explored themes of moral redemption against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis. Over his prolific career, he produced a variety of novels, both tragic and comic, as well as critically acclaimed nonfiction works focused on the Middle East and Egyptian history. His writing is marked by a graceful prose style and an intricate examination of personal identity and morality in a complex world. Newby passed away on September 6, 1997, leaving behind a significant legacy in postwar British literature.
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P. H. Newby
- Born: June 25, 1918
- Birthplace: Crowborough, East Sussex, England
- Died: September 6, 1997
Biography
Percy Howard Newby was born June 25, 1918, in Crowborough, East Sussex, England. Because his father was made a scant living trading in domestic goods, the family moved about the British midlands as Newby was growing up. Because of that peripatetic life, Newby found great comfort in reading and assumed early on that he would be a writer. His first work, a poem, was published when he was eighteen. He began at St. Paul’s College in Cheltenham but never completed his studies. He entered the army in 1939. He served in Egypt, where he would stay until 1946 teaching English at Fouad I University in Cairo (now Cairo University). The stay altered his life by exposing him to a culture radically different from his Western experience.
After the publication of his first novel, A Journey to the Interior, Newby returned to England. The novel, a psychological study of a man whose wife has died in childbirth, charts the difficult journey toward spiritual recovery in which the stricken man is guided by a woman who bears a striking resemblance to his late wife. The novel was well received, and Newby began a prolific decade, writing a number of novels that explored weighty questions of a central character tested by profound moral dilemmas amid a larger world of spiritual impoverishment.
In 1949, his place secure among the most recognized postwar British novelists, Newby accepted a position as an administrator with the British Broadcasting Corporation, a career that would last more than thirty years. During this time, he would nevertheless continue to write at a prodigious rate, both moral studies and comic novels of manners. It was in 1968, however, that Newby, at fifty, published the ambitious novel considered his landmark achievement: Something to Answer For.
Set in Egypt at the time of the Suez Crisis in 1956, the novel centers on the moral redemption of a small-time crook and self- admitted lecher who is asked to help settle an old friend’s estate by his elderly widow. Intending to profit handsomely by the experience, the man is beaten senseless by robbers and left in the desert, uncertain of his identity. The narrative juxtaposes the spiritual reclamation of the reprobate, who comes to assert his own sense of honor, against the larger moral questions of the British occupation of Egypt. The book was catapulted into international attention when the following year it was awarded the first Booker Prize, the most prestigious (and the most lucrative) British literary prize.
Over the next two decades, Newby continued to write, most notably a series of successful, critically acclaimed nonfiction works that examined questions of the Middle East and the history of Egypt. He died on September 6, 1997. A prolific master of both tragic and comic novels with a flair for character and a graceful prose line, Newby brought to the postwar British novel a profound sensibility in the tradition of late Edwardian novelists that demanded, whether in comedy or tragedy, that characters rise and fall by how they define the self morally in an inhospitable amoral universe.