Cyril Connolly (Cyril Vernon Connolly) Biography

British essayist, editor, and critic, born in Coventry, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. After a period as secretary to Logan Pearsall Smith, he began his career as a literary journalist and editor. He remains best known for his editorship of Horizon. The Rock Pool (1936), his first substantial publication, is an entertainingly insubstantial novel about a young Englishman in an artists' colony in the South of France; his unfinished novel entitled Shade Those Laurels (1990) was completed by Peter Levi. Enemies of Promise (1938) contained a series of essays on the hazards placed in the way of literary talent, and the highly regarded autobiographical fragment ‘A Georgian Boyhood’. His numerous further collections of essays and articles include The Condemned Playground (1945), Ideas and Places (1953), and The Evening Colonnade (1973). Among his other publications is The Unquiet Grave: A World Cycle, an idiosyncratic assemblage of aphorisms published in 1944 under the pseudonym ‘Palinurus’. David Pryce-Jones edited his journal and published it with a biographical study in Connolly: Journal and Memoir (1983).