Angus Wilson, the British novelist, critic, and biographer, was born in Bexhill, Sussex in 1913. He studied at Merton College, Oxford (1932-1935) and afterwards took a position at the British Museum. He retained that position for nearly 20 years, interrupted only by this service as a member of the intelligence branch of the Foreign Office during the Second World War. After the war, Wilson became superintendent of the Reading Room at the museum and was responsible for replacing nearly 300,000 books that had been lost during wartime bombings. Wilson published a first collection of short fiction, The Wrong Set, in 1949. A first novel, Hemlock and After, was published in 1952, followed by a work of non-fiction, a study of Emile Zola. Wilson was also a teacher and lecturer. He was a professor of English at the University of East Anglia, 1966-1978, and held visiting lectureship at American schools including the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Delaware. He was the John Hinkley Visiting Professor, fall term 1974, at the Johns Hopkins University. Wilson's novel, No Laughing Matter (1967), established his position as the forebear of the Angry Young Men of British drama and fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. Two critical biographies written by Wilson are considered very important in recent English literature: The World of Charles Dickens (1970) and The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1978). Wilson resided in Suffolk, England and was knighted by Queen Elisabeth II in 1980. Angus Wilson died in 1991.