Philip Callow

Philip Kenneth Callow (26 October 1924 – 22 September 2007) was an English novelist known for his autobiographical portrayals of working-class life. During a long career as a writer, he published 16 novels, poetry, and several biographies of artists and authors, including Vincent van Gogh, D. H. Lawrence, Anton Chekhov, Walt Whitman, and Paul Cézanne.

Life Callow was born into a working-class family in Stechford, near Birmingham. In 1930, his family moved to Coventry, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He attended Coventry Technical College, and at the age of 15 was apprenticed as a toolmaker at the Coventry Gauge and Tool Company. In 1948, he became a clerk at the ministries of war and supplies, where he worked for three years. He later moved to Plymouth and became a clerk at the South West Electricity Board.

His first novel, The Hosanna Man, appeared in 1956, but was withdrawn by the publisher over a threatened libel suit. According to a present-day commentator, "The flair he would display as both a novelist and biographer is very much in evidence." Though he continued writing novels, he returned to school in the 1960s, attending Exmouth College of Education, where he trained as a teacher. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught creative writing at various universities, and turned to writing biographies, starting with Son and Lover, a biography of D. H. Lawrence published in 1975. From 1980 to 1986, he was appointed writer-in-residence at Sheffield Polytechnic. Common People was chosen as one of the Sunday Times best books of the year by John Betjeman, who said that Callow's writing "sounds like a genuine cry from a class usually silent in the literary world."

In subsequent novels, including Native Ground (1959), A Pledge for the Earth (1960), and Clipped Wings (1963), Callow experimented with non-autobiographical subject matter and third-person narration.

Another Flesh trilogy Callow's "best-received and appreciated fictional work" was the trilogy Going to the Moon (1968), The Bliss Body (1969), and Flesh of the Morning (1971), later released in an omnibus volume as Another Flesh. V. S. Naipaul called Callow's prose "clear and easy and elegant" and his observations of people and settings "sharp but kind and never superficial." Margaret Drabble also praised Callow's fairness and accuracy: "By some happy balance of insight and sympathy, Philip Callow manages to engage attention and understanding without alienating common sense." J. B. Priestley praised his "admirable and indeed all-too-rare truth, sincerity and sensitiveness" and said that his prose was "one beautifully, with fine economy." Some scholars include Callow as a member of the Angry Young Men, a loosely-affiliated group of post-war working-class authors.