West, Anthony
Entry updated 16 January 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1914-1987) UK author, who used his mother's pseudonym not her legal surname (Fairfield), son of H G Wells and Rebecca West; in America for much of his life. His H G Wells: Aspects of a Life (1984), published just after his mother's death, was widely understood as an act of retribution aimed mainly at her – he was raised eccentrically, mostly at her hands – and only secondarily at Wells; his earlier nonfantastic novel, Heritage (1955), had been even more explicit, and was not published in the UK until after her death.
West's first novel, On a Dark Night (1949; vt The Vintage 1950), is an Afterlife fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] which describes a Suicide's questings through space and time for the meaning of life. Another Kind (1951) is a Near-Future story with love in the foreground and a UK civil war that increasingly dominates the scene. [JC]
Anthony Panther West Fairfield
born Hunstanton, Norfolk: 4 August 1914
died Fishers Island, New York: 27 December 1987
works
- On a Dark Night (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1949) [hb/John Piper]
- The Vintage (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1950) [vt of the above: hb/Anne Marie Jauss]
- Another Kind (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951) [hb/John Morris]
- Heritage (New York: Random House, 1955) [hb/]
nonfiction
- H G Wells: Aspects of a Life (London: Hutchinson, 1984) [nonfiction: H G Wells: hb/photo of Wells from author's collection]
links
previous versions of this entry