Children of the Sun

Summary

Children of the Sun is Martin Green's term for that brilliant and influential generation of young men who, in the aftermath of World War I, refused to become the fathers, husbands, and heads of households their fathers had been before them. Instead, they cultivated all their lives, alternative styles of young manhood—the dandy, the rogue, and the naïf—which then became for a time the dominant cultural styles of much of the English-speaking world.

Martin Green traces the fate of that gifted generation through the lives of two of its central figures, Harold Acton and Brian Howard, and some forty of their friends, most of whom attained considerable importance in British life, notably, in the arts and letters, but also in the sciences, diplomacy, and politics. Prominent among them are Evelyn Waugh, Randolph Churchill, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Cecil Beaton, Cyril Connolly, John Strachey, “Kim” Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald MacLean. Their story takes us from Eton, Oxford, London in the twenties, through the Depression and World War II, into exile, the decay of hope, aging, and suicide. A contrapuntal them of Green’s book is the rise of the opposition to “the Children of the Sun,” in F.R. Leavis, George Orwell, Kingsley Amis, and others whose “turn” came in the late 1950s.

About the Author

Martin B. Green was born in 1932 in England. He is a professor, writer, playwright, editor, and publisher. His numerous books explore psychoanalysis, philosophical nonviolence, counter-cultures, and adventure among other social and intellectual topics.