THOMAS HINDE

Author biography:
Thomas Hinde is the pen-name of Sir Thomas Willes Chitty, who was born in 1926 in Felixstowe, Suffolk, the son of a boys’ school headmaster. He was educated at University College, Oxford, where he read Modern History, and began writing his first novel while serving as a teacher to a farmer’s two children. He worked as a civil servant and later as an executive of the Shell Company before becoming a full-time writer in 1960.
His first novel, Mr. Nicholas, appeared in 1952 to great critical acclaim. The influential critic Kenneth Allsop called it ‘one of the few really distinguished post-war novels’, and it was widely praised in both England and America. Other successes followed and secured Hinde’s reputation as one of the most gifted English novelists of his generation; some of the best are Ninety Double Martinis (1963), The Day the Call Came (1964), and Games of Chance (1965), the latter comprising two novellas, ‘The Interviewer’ and ‘The Investigator’. High (1968), a novel set on a college campus, drew on Hinde’s experiences teaching at the University of Illinois from 1965 to 1967. Four further novels appeared in the 1970s, followed by Daymare in 1980, and, after a twenty-six-year gap, In Time of Plague (2006). Hinde has also published more than a dozen nonfiction books, including biographies, history, and travel books, sometimes written with his wife, Susan Chitty. He and his wife live in Sussex.
Thomas Hinde is the pen-name of Sir Thomas Willes Chitty, who was born in 1926 in Felixstowe, Suffolk, the son of a boys’ school headmaster. He was educated at University College, Oxford, where he read Modern History, and began writing his first novel while serving as a teacher to a farmer’s two children. He worked as a civil servant and later as an executive of the Shell Company before becoming a full-time writer in 1960.
His first novel, Mr. Nicholas, appeared in 1952 to great critical acclaim. The influential critic Kenneth Allsop called it ‘one of the few really distinguished post-war novels’, and it was widely praised in both England and America. Other successes followed and secured Hinde’s reputation as one of the most gifted English novelists of his generation; some of the best are Ninety Double Martinis (1963), The Day the Call Came (1964), and Games of Chance (1965), the latter comprising two novellas, ‘The Interviewer’ and ‘The Investigator’. High (1968), a novel set on a college campus, drew on Hinde’s experiences teaching at the University of Illinois from 1965 to 1967. Four further novels appeared in the 1970s, followed by Daymare in 1980, and, after a twenty-six-year gap, In Time of Plague (2006). Hinde has also published more than a dozen nonfiction books, including biographies, history, and travel books, sometimes written with his wife, Susan Chitty. He and his wife live in Sussex.