Humphrey Carpenter

Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter (born April 29, 1946 in Oxford ; † January 4, 2005 ibid) was a British biographer and children's book author.

Life

After studying at Oxford, Carpenter held lectures on the English language and literature at Keble College there . There he met JRR Tolkien several times .

Carpenter worked for the BBC radio program for a while until he began working on Tolkien's authorized biography. This was published in 1977 under the title JRR Tolkien - A Biography . He also edited a selection of Tolkien's letters.

He later wrote other biographies, including those of WH Auden (1981), Ezra Pound (1988), Benjamin Britten (1992), Robert Runcie (1997), Spike Milligan (2004) and the Inklings . For the last, a group biography about the members of the Inklings (JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and their friends), Carpenter received the Somerset Maugham Award .

Carpenter also published several children's books, including the Mr. Majeica series and the 1984 Oxford Companion to Children's Literature , as well as plays and radio plays. Carpenter was also a gifted jazz musician who performed with his own band, the Vile Bodies .

Carpenter, who suffered from Parkinson's disease , died of heart failure in his home in Oxford on January 4, 2005.

Works (selection)

as an author

• The angry young men . A literary comedy of the 1950s . Faber & Faber, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-571-24912-1 .
• The brideshead generation. Evelyn Waugh and his friends . Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Mass. 1990, ISBN 0-395-44142-0 .
• Geniuses together. American writers in Paris in the 1920s . Houghton Mifflin, London 1988, ISBN 0-395-46416-1 .
• The Inklings. CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends . 3rd ed. HarperCollins, London 1997, ISBN 0-261-10347-4 .
• JRR Tolkien. A biography . 2nd edition Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-608-93431-6 .
• OUDS. A centenary history of the "Oxford University Dramatic Society"; 1885-1985 . University Press, Oxford 1985, ISBN 0-19-212241-X .
• A serious character. The life of Ezra Pound . Delta Press, New York 1990, ISBN 0-385-29996-6 .
• The seven lives of John Murray . The story of a publishing dynasty; 1768-2002 . Murray Publ., London 2008, ISBN 978-0-7195-6532-8 .

as editor

• Letters from JRR Tolkien . 2nd edition Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-608-93650-5 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Humphrey Carpenter in the catalog of the German National Library
• Humphrey Carpenter in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (English)
• Short biography at Penguin Books UK
• Short biography on BBC Radio 4
• Short biography ( Memento from May 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) at the Orion Publishing Group
• Brief biography at HarperCollins
• BBC announcement of his death on news.bbc.co.uk
• John Kelly: Humphrey Carpenter . Obituary in The Guardian , Jan. 5, 2005.