Denton Welch (Maurice Denton Welch) Biography

British novelist and essayist, born in Shanghai, educated at Repton School and Goldsmith's School of Art, London. As a consequence of a serious bicycle accident in 1935 he became a partial invalid. All Welch's books, some of them illustrated by himself, are strongly autobiographical. Maiden Voyage (1943) recaptures with sensory richness his running away from school and going to China to join his father. In Youth Is Pleasure (1944) conveys the physical confusions of pubescence. Posthumously published were Brave and Cruel, and Other Stories (1949), mostly narrated in the first person, reflecting different experiences of the author's short life; A Voice through a Cloud (1950), a powerful recollection of his accident and the indignity he suffered as an invalid; and The Last Sheaf (1951; edited by Eric Oliver), a collection of stories, pictures, and poems. In his Journals (1952; unexpurgated version 1984, edited by Michael De-la-Noy) he lays bare with brave honesty his own neurotic and difficult personality as well as conveying, again with sensory detail, the texture of life in the English countryside, particularly during the Second World War.