By chance the book world’s agitation over The Autograph Man coincided with the death of a friend of mine. William Cooper (the pseudonym of Harry Summerfield Hoff) died on 5 September at the advanced age of ninety-two. While his name may not mean very much to the crowd of young people lining up to offer hasty assessments of Zadie Smith’s second novel, he was rather a dog in his day. Postwar English Literature would have taken a very different course without the influence of Scenes From Provincial Life (1950), and for forty years afterwards Cooper remained a lively, opinionated and occasionally irascible presence on its inner margin.

Literary Review

Nov 2002

Categories

D J Taylor

Biographer’s Luck

Something to Read in the Evenings

Dusting off the Crystal Ball

Piano Man

Whatever Happened to the Establishment?

Author of Himself

Old Stench of Death

Told by a Dog

The History of Mart

They Finished Their Drinks and Left

Nero to Zero

Porn Again

‘He Wrote This Specially For Me’

Sorrowing in Sunlight

A Life Less Extraordinary

Passage to Hampstead

Naked in Nottingham

In Defence of the Hack

East Coast Escapades

Mart – The Return

The American Delusion

The Solace of Solitude

Hour of the Egoist

Where Mischief Starts