Cyril Connolly

Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English literary critic, essayist, and editor whose reviews and editorial work helped shape mid-twentieth-century British literary culture. He combined classical learning, sharp comic observation, and a public lament for unrealised talent in a body of writing that had wide influence on his contemporaries.

Connolly was born on September 10, 1903, in Coventry, the only child of Major Matthew Connolly and Muriel Vernon. He spent parts of his childhood in South Africa where his father served, and was educated at St Cyprian's School in Eastbourne, Eton College on a King's Scholarship, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read history and graduated with a third-class degree in 1925.

He worked as a secretary to the American writer Logan Pearsall Smith and from 1927 contributed reviews to The New Statesman. His novel The Rock Pool appeared in 1936 and the autobiographical study Enemies of Promise in 1938. The latter examined the social and psychological obstacles to a literary career and remains his best-known book.

In 1940, with Stephen Spender and the support of Peter Watson, he founded the literary magazine Horizon, which he edited until its closure in 1949. He later wrote a long-running review column for The Sunday Times and published The Unquiet Grave (1944), The Missing Diplomats (1952), and The Modern Movement (1965). He died at Eastbourne on November 26, 1974, aged 71.

His name Cyril derives from the Greek Kyrillos, from kyrios meaning "lord." Cyril was popular in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain before declining in twentieth-century use.