The Last Englishman

the long version

"J.L. Carr was the most English of Englishmen: a man who spent most of his working life in the middle of Middle England, as headmaster of a Northamptonshire school, and enthusiastic follower of cricket and a tireless campaigner for the conservation of country churches. But he was also the author of half a dozen of the quirkiest, most comic novels in English, and a publisher (from his own back bedroom in Kettering) of some of the most eccentric, collectible - and smallest - books ever printed... Now Byron Rogers, who knew him well, tells for the first time the full story of J.L. Carr's life, a tale both surprising and extraordinarily varied, from war service on a West African flying-boat base to a strange interlude teaching in the heart of South Dakota. It reveals a quixotic, civic-minded and thoroughly decent man, who would hold arithmetic races on sports day, paved his garden path with the printing plates from his hand-drawn maps, and led his schoolchildren through the streets of Kettering to hymn the beauty of the cherry trees--and, above all, a novelist whose fiction is more thoroughly autobiographical than anyone has hitherto realized. The Last Englishman is more than the fascinating life of a truly unique individual: it is a frequently comic and always touching portrait of the best kind of Englishness"--Book jacket.