Ian Vaughan Kenneth Ousby (26 June 1947 – 6 August 2001) was a British historian, author and editor.

Biography

Ian Ousby was born in

Marlborough, Wiltshire Marlborough ( , ) is a market town and civil parish in the English county of Wiltshire on the Old Bath Road, the old main road from London to Bath. The town is on the River Kennet, 24 miles (39 km) north of Salisbury and 10 miles (16& ...

to an army officer and his wife. Ousby's father was stabbed to death in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

in 1947 during the

Partition Partition may refer to: Computing Hardware * Disk partitioning, the division of a hard disk drive * Memory partition, a subdivision of a computer's memory, usually for use by a single job Software * Partition (database), the division of a ...

, leaving his mother to raise him. He was educated at

Bishop's Stortford College Bishop's Stortford College is a independent day and boarding school in the English public school tradition for more than 1,200 pupils aged 4–18, situated in a campus on the edge of the market town of Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, Englan ...

before matriculating to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he gained a

double first The British undergraduate degree classification system is a grading structure for undergraduate degrees or bachelor's degrees and integrated master's degrees in the United Kingdom. The system has been applied (sometimes with significant variati ...

in English and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1968 to study at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

. While at Harvard, Ousby was awarded the

Howard Mumford Jones Howard Mumford Jones (April 16, 1892 – May 11, 1980) was an American intellectual historian, literary critic, journalist, poet, and professor of English at the University of Michigan and later at Harvard University. Jones was the book editor for ...

Prize for the best doctoral thesis of the year. Following graduation, Ousby became an academic, teaching English literature at Durham University and the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...

. An "intense dislike of organisations, as well as strong and divergent specialist interests", resulted in him leaving the University of Maryland in 1983 to become a freelance writer. The subjects of his books ranged from detective fiction, with ''Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle'' to military history with ''The Road to Verdun'' and ''Occupation: the ordeal of France, 1940–1944'', which was awarded the Edith McLeod Literary Prize and the Stern Silver PEN for Non-Fiction in 1998. His most noted work was as editor of ''The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English'', which was first published in 1988 and republished in various forms in 1993, 1996 and 1998. After being diagnosed with cancer, he died on 6 August 2001.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ousby, Ian 1947 births 2001 deaths Alumni of Magdalen College, Oxford English literary historians English military historians Harvard University alumni