David Lodge, who has died aged 89, was, like his close friend Malcolm Bradbury, a professor of English literature who became even better known as a novelist. The two men occupied adjacent offices for some years at Birmingham University in the early 1960s and greatly influenced each other. Both were grammar school boys from non-academic backgrounds who became leading figures in English letters without ever darkening the gateways of Oxford or Cambridge universities. Both wrote novels in part out of an instinct to reach a wide constituency of readers with literary tastes.
Lodge worked briefly for the British Council before getting his first academic job in 1960, as a lecturer in English literature at Birmingham. In the same year his first novel, The Picturegoers, was published. This and the novel that followed, Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962), were written under the influence of Graham Greene, a fellow doubting Roman Catholic novelist whom the young Lodge much admired. Lodge’s own PhD, The Catholic Novel from the Oxford Movement to the Present Day, had examined the genre to which he himself began to contribute.
