STOREY, DAVID (MALCOLM)

born July 13, 1933, Wakefield, Yorkshire, Eng. English novelist and playwright whose brief professional rugby career and lower-class background provided material for the simple, powerful prose that won him early recognition as an accomplished storyteller and dramatist. After completing his schooling at Wakefield at 17, Storey signed a 15-year contract with the Leeds Rugby League Club; he also won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art in London. When the conflict between rugby and painting became too great, he paid back three-quarters of his signing-on fee, and Leeds let him go. Storey had written and laid aside seven novels before his eighth, This Sporting Life (1960), was published, and for it Storey received the MacMillan Award. It is the story of a professional rugby player and his affair with his widowed landlady. Storey wrote the script for a film based on the novel and directed by Lindsay Anderson in 1966the beginning of a remarkably fruitful professional relationship between the two. Other novels followed: Flight into Camden (1960), a story that won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1961 and the Somerset Maugham Award in 1963, about an independent young woman who defies her mining family by going off to live with her married lover in London; Radcliffe (1963), about the struggle for power in a homosexual relationship; Pasmore (1972), on the regeneration of a man who had given himself up for lost; and Saville (1976), an autobiographical account of the breaking away of a coal miner's son from village life, awarded the Booker Prize. Storey later published A Prodigal Child (1982). Storey also established a reputation as a playwright. His first play, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton (performed 1966), won immediate recognition. In Celebration (performed 1969; filmed 1974), directed by Anderson, returned to a recurring Storey theme: the power that the past has over the present and the impossibility of making a clean break with one's lower class roots and background. The Contractor (performed 1969) was praised for its poetic atmosphere; Home (1970), a quiet, ironic conversation piece set in an insane asylum; The Changing Room (1971), a tense, plotless play set in the changing room of a semiprofessional rugby team; and Life Class (1974), about a failed art master. Later plays include Mother's Day (1976), Sisters (1978), and Early Days (1980).