The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780375727443)

In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young.
Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist.
Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his
experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor's orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three.
Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of
his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time.
Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique
portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.

Author: Sebastian Faulks
ISBN-10: 0375727442
ISBN-13: 9780375727443
Publisher: Vintage
Language: English
Published: 03/12/2002
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.67lbs
Size: 7.95h x 5.17w x 0.68d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 03/01/2002 pg. 3005
Library Journal 04/01/2002 pg. 118
Vanity Fair 05/01/2002 pg. 78
Booklist 04/01/2002 pg. 1296
Publishers Weekly 04/08/2002 pg. 219
Lambda Book Report 06/01/2002 pg. 29
Kliatt 09/01/2002 pg. 32