James Stern (James Andrew Stern) Biography

Irish writer, born in Co. Meath, educated at Eton. His career began as a journalist on the London Mercury and he also travelled widely. His first volume of short stories, The Heartless Land (1932), established him as a distinctive voice and was followed by several other collections, including Something Wrong (1938) and The Man Who Was Loved (1952). His work was praised by contemporaries such as M. Lowry, W. H. Auden, and C. Isherwood, who, writing in 1952, described Stern as ‘the most unjustly neglected writer of short stories today’. His stories were later collected as The Stories of James Stern (1968) and display his lucid style and ear for dialogue in their treatment of themes connected with childhood, loss of innocence, and the dispossessed. He was also a distinguished translator of German and Eastern European writers such as Mann, Kafka, Brecht, and Broch. The Hidden Damage (1947; reprinted 1990) is a study of life in Germany during the summer of 1945.