First Boredom Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin Book

When Philip Larkin's letters and a damning biography were published in the early 1990s, his enemies seized on the new disclosures with a frenzy hardly witnessed since the McCarthy era. Larkin was accused of being a misogynist and xenophobic, and his reputation as a poet was tarnished by his image as a human being. Richard Bradford's biography reveals that Larkin treated his prejudices and peculiarities with detached circumspection. Sometimes he shared them, self-mockingly, self-destructively, with his closest friends; he divided up his life so that some people knew him well but none completely. It was only in the poems that the parts began to resemble the whole. ""In this thoroughly researched...well-written depiction, fans will find much-from gossip to scholarship-to stoke their interest."" -Publishers Weekly. ""Bradford's book...places welcome emphases on matters that Motion glided over too lightly."" -The New York Review of Books.Read More