When Roy Fuller died in 1991, there was a wide consensus of opinion: he was among the finest poets of his time, a novelist of importance, a man whose multi-stranded career -- literary, cultural, professional -- was distinguished and exemplary. It was agreed that he had been undervalued; he never quite, in his self-deprecating phrase, 'caught on'.
    
Early in 1990 Neil Powell approached Roy Fuller with a proposal to write a 'literary biography' -- revaluing the work in the context of the life -- and received Fuller's blessing. Drawing on unpublished letters and journals and on all the published writing, Roy Fuller: Writer and Society provides the first coherent, integrated account of an astonishing life's work. All the books of poetry are discussed, with close readings of vital individual poems; and the novels receive sustained attention. A fascinating and at times hilarious story of his other careers unfolds: as provincial schoolboy, solicitor's clerk, law student; wartime Navy radar engineer in England and East Africa; post-war solicitor and legal director of Woolwich Building Society; Oxford Professor of Poetry, BBC Governor, Chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel. This book offers an authoritative study of a major writer and a portrait of a wise, wry, complex and likable man.