Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd 1949-, British author, b. London; studied Clare College, Cambridge (M.A., 1971) and Yale. A literary journalist, he wrote for the Spectator (1973-82) and has reviewed books for the London Times since 1986. His early work includes three volumes of poetry (1973, 1978, 1987), a polemic on literary modernism (1976), and a study of transvestism (1979). His first novel, The Great Fire of London (1982), was followed by The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Hawksmoor (1985), Chatterton (1987), English Music (1992), Milton in America (1997), The Plato Papers (2000), The Clerkenwell Tales (2004), and The Fall of Troy (2007). Typically novels of ideas that reflect an enormous range of intellectual interest and inquiry and that defy traditional realism, his fiction frequently deals with the active interplay between the past and the present and often uses the city of London as both locale and thematic touchstone. English literary figures and murder make frequent appearances in these works. Ackroyd also is a perceptive biographer whose subjects include Ezra Pound (1980, rev. ed. 1987), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), and J. M. W. Turner (2002). In addition, he has written a widely praised "biography" of London (2000) and a wide-ranging study of the English literary and artistic imagination, Albion (2003). Many of Ackroyd's literary critical essays are reprinted in The Collection (2001).

Bibliography: See studies by S. Onega (1999) and J. S. W. Gibson (2000).

Ackroyd, Peter (1949– ), novelist, biographer, poet, and reviewer, was educated at Clare College, Cambridge, and Yale. He worked on the Spectator (1973–82), and became the chief book reviewer on The Times in 1986. After an early volume of poems he published two pieces of cultural criticism, Notes for a New Culture (1976, an essay on Modernism) and Dressing Up (1979, a study on transvestism), followed by biographies of Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), and Dickens (1990).

His novels explore active relationships between the present and the historical past. In The Great Fire of London (1982), the relationship focuses on a plan to film Dickens's Little Dorrit, while his gift for historical reconstruction is demonstrated in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983). In Hawksmoor (1985) Detective Nicholas Hawksmoor (namesake of the 18th-cent. architect) investigates a series of murders in London churches that become linked to the rebuilding of the city after the Great Fire of 1666. In Chatterton (1987) a similar dynamic is set up, with modern events being related to the death of the poet Chatterton and the marriage of George Meredith. Ackroyd's blending of genres continued in the visionary autobiography English Music (1992), and in The House of Dr Dee (1993). Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) is set in 1880 and centres on a series of grisly murders in the East End of London. Milton in America (1996) transports Milton to the New World in 1660. Recent works include The Plato Papers (1999), London: A Biography (2000), and Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002).