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Nigel Dennis (Nigel Forbes Dennis) Biography

(1912–89), (Nigel Forbes Dennis), Encounter, Boys and Girls Come out To Play, Cards of Identity



British novelist and dramatist, born in Bletchingley, Surrey, educated in Rhodesia, Austria, and Germany. He was an outstanding journalist and became co-editor of Encounter. Much of his first novel, Boys and Girls Come out To Play (1949), is set in America where he had worked as a journalist from 1931 to 1949. Cards of Identity (1955), which Dennis adapted for the stage in 1956, is widely regarded as his finest work; an extravagantly inventive satire on the shallowness of human identity in modern civilization, the novel culminates, in ‘The Prince of Antioch’, a sustained parody of Shakespeare. A House in Order (1960), set chiefly in a green-house from which the narrator observes a third world war, forms a tautly concentrated fable on the nature of human purpose. His other works as a dramatist include The Making of Moo (1957) and August for the People (1961). His love of the Mediterranean is expressed in An Essay on Malta (1972) and in Exotics (1970), a volume of poems set mainly in that region.



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Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern FictionEncyclopedia of Literature: Walter John De La Mare Biography to Hilda Doolittle Biography