He was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, in 1900, to a mother who was illiterate, but a natural story-teller and a larger-than life, Micawber-like father, whose catastrophes kept the family always on the move. At sixteen he left school to work in the leather trade, and at twenty, just after World War I, daringly moved to Paris and became a journalist, first in Ireland, then in Spain - travelling the country with his first wife Evelyn, an Irish actress, but agonisingly falling in love his second, Dorothy.
Pritchett's stories map the changing lives of apparently 'ordinary people' from the 1930s to the 1990s, but he was an influential literary editor of the New Statesman, and until his death in 1997 his life also charted the literary scene across the years, his many friendships ranging from Yeats and Sean O'Casey, Orwell, Graham Greene and Stephen Spender, to Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. This vibrant new biography, drawing on a mass of unpublished letters and vivid journals, brings our hidden 'English Chekov' to life: quirky yet robust, melancholy yet hilarious, and often surprisingly passionate.