Background
BRADBURY, Malcolm was born on September 7, 1932 in Sheffield, Yorks. Son of Arthur and Doris Ethel (Marshall) Bradbury.
BRADBURY, Malcolm was born on September 7, 1932 in Sheffield, Yorks. Son of Arthur and Doris Ethel (Marshall) Bradbury.
In 1943 Bradbury attended West Bridgford Grammar School where he remained until 1950.
He read English at University College, Leicester and gained a first-class degree in English in 1953 and continued his studies at Queen Mary College, University of London, where he gained his MA in 1955.
He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962.
Between 1955 and 1958 Bradbury moved between teaching posts with the University of Manchester and Indiana University in the US. He returned to England in 1958 for a major heart operation; such was his heart condition that he was not expected to live beyond middle age. Meanwhile, Bradbury completed his first novel Eating People is Wrong in 1959 while in hospital.
He took up his first teaching post as an adult-education tutor at the University of Hull. With his study on Evelyn Waugh in 1962 he began his career of writing and editing critical books. From 1961 to 1965 he taught at the University of Birmingham.
In 1962 he moved to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the world-renowned MA in Creative Writing course, which Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro both attended. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995.
The After Dinner Game
All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go
The Modern British Novel
The Modern American Novel
Cuts
Though he was not an orthodox religious believer, he respected the traditions and socio-cultural role of the Church of England, and enjoyed visiting churches in the spirit of Philip Larkin's famous poem ‘Church Going’.
Married Elizabeth Salt in 1959.