Concept

John Middleton Murry

Summary
John Middleton Murry (6 August 1889 – 12 March 1957) was an English writer. He was a prolific author, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime. A prominent critic, Murry is best remembered for his association with Katherine Mansfield, whom he married in 1918 as her second husband, for his friendship with D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, and for his friendship (and brief affair) with Frieda Lawrence. Following Mansfield's death, Murry edited her work. John Middleton Murry was born in Peckham, London, on 6 August 1889 to John Murry (1860/1–1947), a clerk in the Inland Revenue, and Emily Wheeler (1869/70–1951). John Murry, a self-made man from an "impoverished and illiterate" background, prioritized his son's education. At the age of two, Murry was sent to the Roles Road Board School, and afterward attended the Bellendon Road Higher Grade Board School. His aunt, at the age of 11, called him a "little old man". By 1893, his parents moved from Peckham to East Dulwich, along with his mother's sister and mother, into a shared house. Murry was educated at Christ's Hospital, beginning in 1901, where he got a scholarship to. There, he and friends purchased a jellygraph machine for a newspaper he was the editor-in-chief of, and at 18 became the editor of the school's magazine. When he was 16 and at Christ's Hospital, he was awarded the Charles Lamb medal for his essay, "Literature and Journalism". He also attended Brasenose College, Oxford. There he met the writer Joyce Cary, a lifelong friend. He met Katherine Mansfield at the end of 1911, through W. L. George. His intense relationship with her, her early death, and his subsequent allusions to it, shaped both his later life and the attitudes (often hostile) of others to him. Leonard Woolf in his memoirs called Murry "Pecksniffian". By 1933 his reputation "had touched bottom", and Rayner Heppenstall's short book of 1934, John Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality, could note that he was "the best-hated man of letters in the country".
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