David Lodge

David John Lodge (London, January 28, 1935) is an English novelist, critic and screenwriter.

Biography

He was born in Brockley, south-east London. His father was a violinist and accompanied with the South London Orchestra in silent films. During World War II the family was forced to evacuate the area and settle in Surrey and Cornwall. He studied at University College London (UCL), where he obtained his BA, with honors, in 1955. In 1959 he married Mary Frances Jacob and obtained an MA from UCL. He received his doctorate from the University of Birmingham and worked in the English department of that house from 1960 to 1987, becoming known for his lectures on Victorian fiction. In the period 1965-65 he received a scholarship in the United States. In 1987 he retired from his work activity at the University of Birmingham to devote himself entirely to literary creation, retaining the title of Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at that university and remaining domiciled in Birmingham. His writings are in the special collections of the University of Birmingham.

His first published novel, The Picturegoergs, 1960, illustrates his early experiences in "Brickley" (town based on Brocley, South East London), which he also described in his later novel Therapy. The Second World War forced Lodge and her mother to move to Surrey and Cornwall.

Lodge is one of the great masters of English humor of our time, and in his works he is often as witty as he is funny. He frequently satirizes the academic world in general and the humanities in particular. Having received a Catholic upbringing, although he has described himself as an "agnostic Catholic", many of his characters are "Catholic, Apostolic and Roman"; Catholicism is also one of his themes, especially in his novels The Fall of the British Museum, How far can you go? (published in the United States as Cuerpos y souls) and News from Paradise.

His fictional locations include the city of Rummidge, modeled after Birmingham, UK, and the equally imaginary US state of 'Euphoria', situated between the states of Northern California and Southern California. Euphoria State University is located in the town of 'Plotinus,' a dim disguise of Berkeley, California.

Several of his novels, including Small World, 1988 and Good Job, 1989, have been adapted into television series, the last of which by the same Lodge. Nice Work was filmed at the University of Birmingham. In 1994 Lodge adopted Martin Chuzzlewit from Charles Dickens for the BBC.

In 1997 he received the Order of Arts and Letters in the degree of Knight from the French Ministry of Culture, and in 1998 he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature.

Two of Lodge's novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and in 1989 he was president of the Booker Prize jury. His thirteenth work, Deaf Sentence, published in 2008, is a novel that some have considered comical, when in reality old age, death and the infirmities of the third age are described with the vision of the son who cares for the father and who at the same time time is undergoing the changes of aging. As he himself admits, it is a self-referential novel, about Desmond Bates, a retired linguistics professor with severe hearing difficulties, who bitterly complains that blindness is so tragic, deafness is comical.

Works

Fiction

• The Picturegoers, 1960
• Ginger, You're Barmy1962
• The Fall of the British Museum (The British Museum is Falling Down1965)
• Out of the shell (Out of the Shelter1970)
• Exchanges: history of two universities (Changing Places: a tale of two campuses, 1975), campus trilogy 1
• How Far can you Go?1980
• The World is a handkerchief (Small World: an academic romance, 1984), trilogy of campus 2
• Good job! (Nice Work, 1988), trilogy of campus 3
• News of paradise (Paradise News1991)
• Therapy (Therapy1995)
• Dirty suits (Home Truths1999)
• Secret thoughts (Thinks...2001)
• The author, the author! (Author, Author2004)
• Life in sordina (Deaf Sentence2007)
• A man of parts, 2011

No fiction

• Language of fiction: essays in criticism and verbal analysis of the english novel, 1966
• The novelist at the crossroads, 1971
• 20th century literary criticism: a reader, 1972, as an editor
• The modes of modern writing: metaphor, metonymy, and the typology of modern literature, 1977
• Working with structuralism1981
• Write on: occasional essays1986
• Modern criticism and theory: a reader1988, as an editor
• After Bakhtin1990
• The art of fiction: with examples of classic and modern texts, (The Art of Fiction1992)
• The practice of writing1997
• Consciousness and novel: literary criticism and literary creation, (Consciousness and the novel2003)
• The year of Henry James: the story of a novel2006
• Lives in writing, 2014