John Middleton Murry, Jr.

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John Middleton Murry, Jr. (May 9, 1926 – March 31, 2002) was an English writer who used the names Colin Murry and Richard Cowper.

Murry was the son of the writer John Middleton Murry and his second wife, the former Violet Le Maistre, who died just before the boy's fifth birthday. John Jr., nicknamed "Colin" by a grandmother, attended Rendcomb College, a progressive school. He enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1944 but did not see combat. After the war he read Anglo-Saxon and English at Brasenose College, from which he graduated in 1949. He married Ruth Jezierski just after his final exams. The couple had two daughters.

His first novel, the autobiographical The Golden Valley, was finished in 1954 but not published until 1958 as by Colin Murry. In the 1960s he turned to science fiction and fantasy under the name of Richard Cowper and attained considerable popularity. His writing always aimed at direct, intense feeling, with little or none of the irony and cynicism characteristic of much twentieth-century literature. He retired from writing in 1986, stating that he had nothing more to say, and turned to painting and repairing Victorian chairs.

In 2002, four weeks after the death of his wife, Murry died—of a broken heart, according to his daughters.

[edit] Selected bibliography

As Colin Murry

The Golden Valley (1953)
Recollections of a Ghost (1960)
A Path to the Sea (1961)
Private View (1972)

As Richard Cowper

Phoenix (1967)
Breakthrough (1967)
Domino (1971)
Kuldesak (1972)
Clone (1972)
Time Out of Mind, with W. R. Cowper (1973)
The Twilight of Briareus (1974)
Worlds Apart (1974)
Profundis (1979)
The White Bird of Kinship
- The Road to Corlay (1978)
- A Dream of Kinship (1981)
- A Tapestry of Time (1982)

(The short story "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" acts as a prologue to the three Kinship novels. It appears in the collection The Custodians as well as in some editions of The Road to Corlay.)