Tom Sharpe, 1928–2013

last updated 8 January 2015

Tom Sharpe’s bawdy, satirical novels about English society led some to label him the heir to P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, but the author had little affection for his compatriots. “I love England,” he said in 2010, “but I don’t like the English.”

Sharpe’s London upbringing was colored by his father, an unashamed supporter of Adolf Hitler, said The New York Times. Sharpe “grew up awash in Nazi ideology.” Only when he saw footage of the concentration camps in 1945 did he discover, he said, that Hitler “was not the man I was led to believe he was.” After studying at Cambridge, Sharpe immigrated to South Africa to work as a social worker. He became a fierce opponent of apartheid, and was deported in 1961 after writing a play criticizing the country’s regime.

Sharpe wrote his first novel in 1971 at age 43, said The Washington Post, and produced one almost every year for the next decade, each stuffed with sex and dark satire. Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure spoofed South African society, and Sharpe poked fun at the “clubby world” of British academia in Porterhouse Blue and local English politics in Blott on the Landscape. He was best known for his six “Wilt” novels, about a cowardly university lecturer battling political correctness, corrupt administrators, and an “overweight, sexually ravenous wife.”