The Strings are False: An Unfinished Autobiography

(, Main)

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An autobiography written in the 1940s but set aside, and published for the first time after MacNeice's death in 1965.'This incomplete account of himself is masterly, and the best thing Louis MacNeice ever wrote in prose. In this book he talks about himself freely, most intelligently, incisively, and without self-pity . . . MacNeice's evaluation of himself at Marlborough, Oxford and Birmingham, and in the thirties, exhibits more luminously than any document so far published the effect of that time and its diversely pulling forces within one sensual and acute and honest makar in the upper middle classes.' Geoffrey Grigson, Guardian

Author Bio

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, later a bishop. He was educated in England at Sherborne, Marlborough and Merton College, Oxford. His first book of poems, Blind Fireworks, appeared in 1929, and he subsequently worked as a translator, literary critic, playwright, autobiographer, BBC producer and feature writer. The Burning Perch, his last volume of poems, appeared shortly before his death in 1965.