Stephen Potter (Stephen Meredith Potter) Biography

English humorist and radio producer, born at Clapham in South London, educated at Merton College, Oxford. His early works include D. H. Lawrence: A First Study (1930), Coleridge and S. T. C. (1935), and The Muse in Chains (1937), an irreverent attack on the teaching of English literature in universities. In 1938 he became writer and producer in the Features Department of the BBC; among other programmes, he is remembered for the ‘How’ series of wryly amusing commentaries on everyday matters written in collaboration with Joyce Grenfell. The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship; Or the Art of Winning Games without Actually Cheating (1947) was the first of the urbanely humorous treatises on the strategies of success that made him well known in Britain and America; subtly satirical in its revelation of social pretensions, the book set the pattern for Some Notes on Lifesmanship (1950), One-Upmanship (1952), and Supermanship (1958), which jointly donated the ‘—manship’ suffix to the language and were collected along with the original Gamesmanship in The Complete Upmanship (1970). Other works in a similar vein include Christmas-ship; Or the Art of Giving and and Receiving (1956). Steps to Immaturity (1959) is Potter's highly regarded autobiography of boyhood and youth. Alan Jenkins's Stephen Potter appeared in 1980.