MB - Malcolm Bradbury Archive

MB

Collection

Malcolm Bradbury Archive

1949-200?

18 boxes
This will be expressed as linear metres after cataloguing has concluded. Mixed

Bradbury, Malcolm

Bradbury, MalcolmMalcolm Bradbury was born in Sheffield, the son of Arthur Bradbury, a railway worker, and his wife Doris, and grew up in Nottingham, where he attended West Bridgford grammar school. He took a first-class degree in English at the then fairly new University of Leicester, and did postgraduate work at Queen Mary College, London, at Manchester and in the United States, before taking up his first full-time appointment in 1959, in the adult education department at Hull University.

In 1961, he moved to the English department of Birmingham University, where he met another recently- appointed lecturer, David Lodge, with whom he was to form a long and close friendship and amiable rivalry. In 1965, he joined the new University of East Anglia, and, in 1970, became professor of American studies; he was to remain in Norwich for the rest of his life. Bradbury was a co-founder of the internationally renowned MA in Creative Writing at UEA.

Bradbury was a prolific writer – as an academic critic, as a novelist and humorist, and for television, a medium which increasingly fascinated him. His many critical works included The Modern American Novel (1983), No, Not Bloomsbury and The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (both 1987), From Puritanism To Postmodernism: A History Of American Literature (with Richard Ruland, 1991) and Dangerous Pilgrimages (1995).

He also edited The Penguin Book Of Modern British Short Stories (1987) and The Atlas of Literature (1996), to which he was also a major contributor over an astonishingly wide range of topics. His original television dramas included the two four-part series, The Gravy Train (1990) and The Gravy Train Goes East (1991), both sharp and uncomfortably accurate satires on the politics of the European Community, as well as Cuts (1996), which contrasted the visible consumption of television companies with the starvation of universities in an age of sado-monetarism.

Apart from his original scripts, he adapted a wide range of books for television, ranging from Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue and Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man to Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm and the Dalziel and Pascoe novels of Reginald Hill. It is a matter of regret that his adaptation of William Cooper’s Tales From Provincial Life, a novel with which he had particularly close affinities, has not yet reached the television screen.

Deposited by Dominic Bradbury 21 July 2021

Sir Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000) was Professor at UEA's former School of English and American Studies (EAS) from 1970-1994.

This collection is currently being catalogued and will be available to visitors and researchers in due course. It includes correspondence, working papers and desk diaries as well as digital material.

To enquire further about this collection please email archives@uea.ac.uk

Due to the provenance of Malcolm Bradbury collections deposited at UEA at different stages, archive material relating to Bradbury is distributed across several collection areas. Therefore, please also refer to the following catalogue records:

Files UEA/BRAD/1-27 contain papers collected by Bradbury during his Professorship at (EAS) including correspondence, course administrative papers, course work and notes, and papers relating to examinations held at this and other universities. In August 2004 EAS was dissolved and three new schools came into existence: Literature and Creative Writing (LIT); Film and Television Studies (FTV); and American Studies (AMS).

Files UEA/BRAD/28-41 relate to the work and writing of Bradbury and include film, radio and television scripts, journal offprints, printed lectures/essays, press cuttings, book jackets, biographical sketches and interviews.

Files UEA/BRAD/1-27 were collected by Alex Noel-Tod (former UEA Subject Librarian) from the Norwich home of the late Malcolm Bradbury in 2005. They were catalogued and became part of the UEA Archive collection in 2006.

Files UEA/BRAD/28-41 form part of a separate deposit (December 2013) made by Dominic Bradbury (Malcolm Bradbury’s son).

[Finding aid: https://archivecollections.uea.ac.uk/uea.brad]

Related collections: Files relating to the MA Creative Writing course led by Bradbury between 1992 and 1995 can be found at LIT/CW.

[Finding aid: https://archivecollections.uea.ac.uk/lit.cw]

To navigate to these and other collections, please click on 'browse' from the home page: [https://archivecollections.uea.ac.uk/browse-archive]

Copyright remains with the Malcolm Bradbury Trust and/or third parties. All rights reserved.