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Peter Vansittart


(b.1920)

Mr. Vansittart was born in Bedford, in south-central England. He attended Haileybury school in Hertfordshire and Winchester College before winning a scholarship to Worcester College, Oxford, where he remained for only a year. His first novel, I Am the World, about the rise and fall of a dictator, was published in 1942. One critic pronounced it the worst book ever published, a judgment that Mr. Vansittart managed to shrug off as he embarked on a writing career that would produce about 50 novels and dozens of other works.From 1947 to 1959, Mr. Vansittart was director of the Burgess Hill school in Hampstead, London, a progressive, coeducational establishment, which provided the material for a comic novel, Broken Canes (1950). While there, he married Jacqueline Goldsmith, a teacher. The marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his companion, Justine Woodward of Old Windsor.A walk on the grounds of a derelict mansion gave him the setting for his first great critical success, The Game and the Ground (1956), about a group of children brutalized by the World War II and on the verge of being rehabilitated when the narrators brother, an unrepentant Nazi, appears on the scene. As a parable of savagery versus civilization, it drew comparisons to William Goldings Lord of the Flies.
 

 
Novels
   I Am the World (1942)
   Enemies (1947)
   The Overseer (1949)
   Broken Canes (1950)
   A Verdict of Treason (1952)
   A Little Madness (1953)
   The Game and the Ground (1956)
   Orders of Chivalry (1958)
   The Tournament (1959)
   A Sort of Forgetting (1960)
   Carolina (1961)
   The Friends of God (1962)
     aka The Siege
   Sources of Unrest (1962)
   The Lost Lands (1964)
   The Story Teller (1968)
   Pastimes of a Red Summer (1969)
   Landlord (1970)
   Quintet (1976)
   Lancelot (1978)
   The Death of Robin Hood (1981)
   Harry (1981)
   Three Six Seven (1983)
   Aspects of Feeling (1986)
   Parsifal (1988)
   The Wall (1990)
   A Choice of Murder (1992)
   A Safe Conduct (1995)
   Hermes in Paris (2000)
   Secret Protocols (2005)
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Collections
   The Dark Tower (1965)
   The Shadow Land (1967)
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