John le carre author biography format
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John le Carré
British novelist and former spy (1931–2020)
David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré (lə-KARR-ay),[1] was a British author,[2] best known for his espionage novels, many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. A "sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer",[3] he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).[4] Near the end of his life, le Carré became an Irish citizen.
Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller, was adapted as an award-winning film, and remains one of his best-known works. This success allowed him to leave MI6 to become a full-time author.[5] His other novels that have been adapted for film or television
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Published by Bloomsbury UK, Harper US
672pp, hardback, £25.00/ $28.99
Reviewed by N.J. Cooper
Click here to buy this book
Is John le Carré one of the greatest English novelists of the post-war era or a writer of overblown commercial thrillers? Adam Sisman’s brilliant and exhaustive biography describes the reception of each of the novels, offering the contradictory judgements of writers from Anthony Burgess to Philip Roth, but he han själv does not come down on one side or the other. I have to declare an interest here: I love most of the novels, particularly the George Smiley sequence, and can re-read them with huge pleasure.
Le Carré’s great subject is betrayal, and Adam Sisman reveals the roots of this obsession. Le Carré – or David Cornwell as he is in real life – has been both victim of treachery and a betrayer in his turn. His father, Ronnie, was a conman, whose crowd of victims includes some astonishing names. He forced David and his elder bro
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Jeffrey Meyers
John le Carré: A Biographer’s Struggle
Eager to write le Carré’s biography, unwilling to proceed without his permission and naively hoping for his help, I wrote a brief letter on September 3, 1989 and sent it to him through his agent. I introduced myself, mentioned my five previous biographies, offered to send him copies, gave two references from prominent English authors, asked if he would authorize a life to make sure it would be done by a capable and responsible writer, and suggested a meeting the next time I was in London.
I was quite astonished—considering his reputation as a difficult, secretive, elusive and intensely private man—to receive on September 12, only nine days later, a two-page handwritten letter giving his home address in Hampstead, north London. Proposing the same ‘neither help nor hinder’ formula that Samuel Beckett had given Deirdre Bair, le Carré said he could obviously not object to my biography and would not obstruct my researches. B