Philip Nicholas Furbank FRSL (; 23 May 1920 – 27 June 2014) was an English biographer, critic and academic. His most significant biography was the well-received life of his friend

E. M. Forster Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly ''A Room with a View'' (1908), ''Howards End'' (1910), and ''A Passage to India'' (1924). He also wrote numerous short stori ...

Career

After

Reigate Grammar School Reigate Grammar School is a 2–18 mixed independent day school in Reigate, Surrey, England. It was established in 1675 by Henry Smith. History The school was founded as a free school for poor boys in 1675 by Alderman Henry Smith with Jon Will ...

, Furbank entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. After graduating with a First in English, he served in the army. He became a corporal in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and was in Italy in 1945. He returned to Emmanuel as a teaching Fellow in 1947. While in Cambridge Furbank became a close friend of the novelist

, and also of the mathematician

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical co ...

, whose literary executor he would become. Furbank moved to London in 1953 and worked as an editor and librarian. He contributed reviews to '' The Listener''. In 1972 he became a professor of the

Open University The Open University (OU) is a British public research university and the largest university in the United Kingdom by number of students. The majority of the OU's undergraduate students are based in the United Kingdom and principally study off- ...

In 1960 in London he married the poet and critic Patricia Beer. The marriage was dissolved by 1964 when she remarried.

Works

Furbank's best known work was his sympathetic and widely acclaimed biography '' E. M. Forster: A Life''. Forster had recognised that a biography was inevitable and had originally asked the novelist

William Plomer William Charles Franklyn Plomer (10 December 1903 – 20 September 1973) was a South African and British novelist, poet and literary editor. He also wrote a series of librettos for Benjamin Britten. He wrote some of his poetry under the pseud ...

to write one. Plomer found it impossible to describe Forster's sexuality and Furbank was asked instead. Forster's old college, King's College, made Furbank a fellow for the two years before Forster's death in 1970 to support the writing and the biography was published in two parts in 1977 and 1978. Furbank won a

Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism is awarded for literary criticism by the University of Iowa on behalf of the Truman Capote Literary Trust. The value of the award is $30,000 (USD), and is said to be the largest annual cash prize for l ...

for his '' Diderot: A Critical Biography'' (1992). He also edited the works of Daniel Defoe and made major contributions to the question of attributions to Defoe in ''A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe'', ''The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe'', and ''A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe'' all co-written with W. R. Owens. Furbank also helped oversee the publication of Alan Turing's collected works. Furbank's other books include ones on the poet Mallarmé and the painter

Poussin Nicolas Poussin (, , ; June 1594 – 19 November 1665) was the leading painter of the classical French Baroque style, although he spent most of his working life in Rome. Most of his works were on religious and mythological subjects painted for ...

, ''Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer'' (1966) and ''Behalf'' (1999) on political thought. Sections of ''Behalf'' on books.google.com"> Sections of ''Behalf'' on books.google.com
Retrieved 6 January 2011

References

Faber & Faber page

Notes

External links

List of works by Furbank on worldcat.org
Retrieved on 6 January 2011
''Misreading Gulliver's Travels''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Furbank, Pn English literary critics English biographers 1920 births 2014 deaths Alumni of Emmanuel College, Cambridge Academics of the Open University Alan Turing Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature 20th-century biographers The New York Review of Books people British Army personnel of World War II Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers soldiers