Devilish repressions

Bertrand Russell's use of fiction as autobiography

Ray Monk

pp. 239-265

in: Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

Whatever the judges had in mind in 1950 when they awarded the Nobel Prize for literature to Bertrand Russell, it was assuredly not that he was a great writer of fiction. Indeed, up until that point, he had not published any. The prize was awarded, rather, for his essays, his History of Western Philosophy, and his last major work of philosophy, Human Knowledge. And yet, perhaps partly inspired by the award, Russell, within a year of winning it, devoted himself to writing short stories. The results — the two volumes published, respectively, in 1953 and 1954 as Satan in the Suburbs and Nightmares of Eminent Persons — are, surely, the weakest attempts at fiction ever produced by a Nobel Prize winner, and they have, for the most part, sunk into a well-deserved obscurity.

Cited authors

Russell Bertrand