Cyril Connolly born 10 September 1903 (d. 1974)Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English man of letters.
He was born in Coventry in Warwickshire to a wealthy family of Anglo-Irish extraction. He was educated at St Cyprian's School and Eton College, at both of which he was an exact contemporary of George Orwell, who remained a life-long friend. Connolly later attended Balliol College, Oxford.
A regular contributor to the leftist New Statesman in the 1930s, Connolly went on to co-edit, with Stephen Spender and Peter Watson, the influential literary magazine Horizon from 1939 to 1950. He was at one time the literary editor for The Observer, and, after 1950, the chief book reviewer for the London Sunday Times. Connolly wrote only one novel, The Rock Pool (1935) a satirical work which was generally well received. Perhaps his best known work is the autobiography Enemies of Promise (1938), in which he attempted to explain why he failed to produce the literary masterpiece which he and others believed he should have been capable of writing. However, the work he wrote afterwards, The Unquiet Grave (under the pseudonym 'Palinurus') is also noteworthy.
Cyril Connolly was a man of letters, a species now almost extinct. He did his best work as a critic and wielded enormous influence. Connolly was an astute critic who informed the thinking and attitudes of a generation. He set exacting standards for himself and his failure to flourish as a writer was something he both acknowledged and was able to explain. As editor of Horizon (1939-1950), Connolly gave a platform to a wide range of distinguished and emerging writers. The magazine was an integral component of intellectual and literary life in England and contributed to the maintenance of a vital literary culture.
He died in 1974.
Since 1976, Connolly's papers and personal library of over 8,000 books have been housed at the University of Tulsa.
Source: Wikipedia