“The
nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without
learning tricks.” – Humphrey Carpenter
Born
on this date in 1946, Carpenter, who was both a writer and radio broadcaster,
was one of the 20th Century’s leading biographers, including major works on both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. A native of Oxfordshire, England,
Carpenter’s notable output of
biographies included J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography and
The Inklings: CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Charles Williams and their Friends,
winner of the 1978 Somerset Maugham Award, given annually to the best book
written by someone under the age of 35.
He
also won the prestigious literary award, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, for
his 1988 book Ezra Pound. 
When he wasn’t writing, he was performing
as a jazz musician, or serving as an engaging broadcaster, host and producer
of many of the BBC’s leading series. He kept up a tireless routine of writing and broadcasting right up to his
premature death from Parkinson’s and heart failure at the age of 58.
“You
call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a
mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it,” he wrote in J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. “By so
naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about
them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is
invention about truth.”
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