Angus Wilson; Prolific British Writer at 77

Sir Angus Wilson, whose observations of the English middle class made him one of Britain’s most distinguished writers, has died at the age of 77.

Wilson died Friday after a stroke at the nursing home where he had spent his last years, in Bury St. Edmunds, southeast England, fellow author Malcolm Bradbury said.

“He was one of four or five great English postwar writers,” said Bradbury, who compared him with William Golding, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch.

Wilson wrote about 50 books, among them the novels “Hemlock and After,” “No Laughing Matter,” “The Naughty Nineties,” “As If by Magic,” and “Setting the World on Fire.”

He also branched into biography with “The World of Charles Dickens.”

“He was enormously amusing and funny,” Bradbury said.

In a 1985 appreciation, The Spectator magazine said: “His novels stretch the liberal outlook on the rack to see if it will snap, and often it does. His characters’ moral attitudes are scrutinized and invariably found wanting, but nevertheless their search for a morality goes on, indicative of Wilson’s belief that ‘life is very difficult for most people and most people make a fair job of it.’ ”

Wilson was born in Durban, South Africa, and educated at Westminster School in London and Oxford University’s Merton College.

He worked in the Foreign Office during World War II, then turned to writing and an academic career.

From 1949 to 1955 he was deputy superintendent of the Reading Room at the British Museum, in charge of replacing 300,000 volumes lost during wartime bombing.

Bradbury, who succeeded Wilson as head of the English department at the University of East Anglia, said Wilson’s death came on the eve of a revival of his work.

His novels are about to be reprinted by Penguin Classics and two of them, “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” and “The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot,” are to be films, Bradbury said.

Wilson was professor of English at East Anglia from 1966 to 1978.

He chaired the National Book League from 1971 to 1974 and was president of the Royal Society of Literature from 1982 to 1988.

He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1958, a Commander of British Empire in 1968 and received a knighthood in 1980.

Wilson was not married.