British writer David Lodge, known in particular for the trilogy in which he ironically depicts academia, has died at the age of 89, his publishing house announced on Friday.
“His contribution to literary culture has been immense, both through his criticism and through his masterful and emblematic novels which have already become classics,” wrote his editor Liz Foley in a press release.
David Lodge was born a few years before the war, on January 28, 1935, a “fairly favorable” time to be born for a future writer in England, he said, in a style typical of his deadpan humor.
He grew up in a modest environment, in the south suburbs of London, where university was “uncharted territory”. The writer is a pure product of the meritocracy of England in the 1950s.
Encouraged by his college teachers, this talented student entered University College London to study literature.
In 1960, he began teaching English literature at the University of Birmingham, where he spent his entire career.
It is with his “campus trilogy” -(Change of scenery (1975), A very small world (1984) et Board game (1988) – that he demonstrated the extent of his talent.
Drawing inspiration from his own experience as a professor, and in particular from a long study trip to the United States, he describes with biting irony the university environment through two representatives of this “minority with exacerbated puritanism”, the Englishman Phillip Swallow and American Morris Zapp.
The first volume earned him the prestigious Hawthorndern Prize, which recognized him as an author, courted by television, which adapted some of his works. In his bestseller Therapy (1995), he sketches the world of media elites, particularly television.
