Stanley Middleton was born and educated in Nottinghamshire. He started writing while at university and published his first novel, A Short Answer, in 1958. He went on to write more than forty novels in a career spanning fifty years. Middleton taught English at a secondary Grammar school and was an accomplished organist and watercolourist, contributing his own artwork to the covers of his 1994 novel Catalysts and the festschrift, Stanley Middleton at Eighty (1999). Middleton’s landscape was The Midlands and in particular its suburban towns (he was once referred to as ‘The Chekhov of suburbia’ ) and he explored the dreams and feelings that exist in apparently ordinary domestic lives.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fiction
A Short Answer (1958)
Harris’s Requiem (1960)
A Serious Woman (1961)
The Just Exchange (1962)
Two’s Company (1963)
Him They Compelled (1964)
Terms of Reference (1966)
The Golden Evening (1968)
Wages of Virtue (1969)
Apple of the Eye (1970)
Brazen Prison (1971)
Cold Gradations (1972)
A Man Made of Smoke (1973)
Holiday (1974)
Distractions (1975)
Still Waters (1976)
Ends and Means (1977)
Two Brothers (1978)
In a Strange Land (1979)
The Other Side (1980)
Blind Understanding (1982)
Entry into Jerusalem (1983)
The Daysman (1984)
Valley of Decision (1985)
An After-Dinner’s Sleep (1986)
After a Fashion (1987)
Recovery (1988)
Vacant Places (1989)
Changes and Chances (1990)
Beginning to End (1991)
A Place to Stand (1992)
Married Past Redemption (1993)
Catalysts (1994)
Toward the Sea (1995)
Live and Learn (1996)
Brief Hours (1997)
Against the Dark (1998)
Necessary Ends (1999)
Small Change (2000)
Love in the Provinces (2002)
Brief Garlands (2004)
Sterner Stuff (2005)
Mother’s Boy (2006)
Her Three Wise Men (2008)
A Cautious Approach (2010)
Non-fiction
Stanley Middleton at Eighty (1999) Edited by David Belbin & John Lucas, this festschrift includes short stories, essays by and about Middleton and a long interview with the author.
