Encyclopedia > Nevil Shute

  Article Content

Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute (January 17, 1899 - January 12, 1960) (real name Nevil Shute Norway) was one of the most popular novelists of the mid-20th century.

Shute's works are generally adventure novels told in a low-key but engrossing style, often with an emphasis on technical areas. No Highway[?] (1948), for example, builds drama around structure failure in an airplane design. Several of his novels also have a supernatural element, notably Round the Bend[?] (1951), which concerns a new religion growing up around an airplane mechanic.

Shut's best-known book is On the Beach (1957), which is set in a world slowly dying from the effects of an atomic war.

Born in London, Shute served in World War I and became an aviator. An engineer as well as a pilot, he was involved with the development of the airship, and after the failure of such lighter-than-air craft, in 1931 founded founded Airspeed Ltd., a airplane construction company.

In 1931 he married Francis Mary Heaton. They had two daughters.

By the outbreak of World War II Shute was already a rising novelist. He joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a sub-lieutenant in the Miscellaneous Weapons Department, where he experimented with secret weapons, a job that appealed to the engineer in him. His celebrity as a writer caused him the Ministry of Information to send him to the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, and later to Burma as a correspondent.

After World War II, he went to live in Australia, decrying what he saw as a decline in his home country. Australia features in many of his later novels, the best-known being A Town Like Alice[?] (1949).

Many of his books were filmed, including The Pied Piper[?] (1942) and No Highway (filmed as "No Highway in the Sky").

Although considered by some to be rather dated, his works still enjoy great popularity.

Bibliography



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Ludvika

...     Contents Ludvika Ludvika is a municipality in central Sweden, in the county of Dalarna. The municipality covers an area of 1500.7 ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 73.5 ms