David Storey
born July 13, 1933, Wakefield, Yorkshire,
Eng.
English novelist and playwright whose
brief professional rugby career and
lower-class background provided material for
the simple, powerful prose that won him
early recognition as an accomplished
storyteller and dramatist.
After completing his schooling at
Wakefield at age 17, Storey signed a 15-year
contract with the Leeds Rugby League Club;
he also won a scholarship to the Slade
School of Fine Art in London. When the
conflict between rugby and painting became
too great, he paid back three-quarters of
his signing-on fee, and Leeds let him go.
Storey’s first published novel, This
Sporting Life (1960), is his best-known. It
is the story of a professional rugby player
and his affair with his widowed landlady.
Storey wrote the script for a film based on
the novel and directed by Lindsay Anderson
in 1966. Other novels followed: Flight into
Camden (1960), about an independent young
woman who defies her mining family;
Radcliffe (1963), about the struggle for
power in a homosexual relationship; Pasmore
(1972), on the regeneration of a man who had
given himself up for lost; and Saville
(1976, Booker Prize), an autobiographical
account of the breaking away of a coal
miner’s son from village life. Later novels
include A Prodigal Child (1982), Present
Times (1984), A Serious Man (1998), As It
Happened (2002), and Thin-Ice Skater (2004).
Storey also established a reputation as a
playwright. His first play, The Restoration
of Arnold Middleton (performed 1966), won
immediate recognition. In Celebration
(performed 1969; filmed 1974), directed by
Anderson, returned to a recurring Storey
theme: the impossibility of making a clean
break with one’s lower-class roots and
background. Later plays include The
Contractor (performed 1969); Home (1970),
set in an insane asylum; The Changing Room
(1971), set in the changing room of a
semiprofessional rugby team; Life Class
(1974), about a failed art master; Mother’s
Day (1976); Sisters (1978); Early Days
(1980); and The March on Russia (1989).
