West was born
Anthony Panther West Fairfield, the son of British authors
Rebecca West and
H. G. Wells. His parents
never married, as Wells was already married to Amy Catherine Robbins, and remained so until after his intimate relationship with West ended (although they remained friends until his death in 1946). In 1955, Anthony West wrote a novel
Heritage, which was technically fiction, but which dealt with the trials of a boy who grows up largely neglected and ignored by his famous parents. This work was a thinly disguised autobiography (a
roman à clef). In it, his mother appeared much worse than his father, whom he admired all his life.
She fell out with him over it, famously threatening to sue if the book was published in Britain. It was not published in Britain until 1984, after she had died. Similarly,
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote when reviewing West's biography of his father that it was "a book whose main purpose seems to be to even the score with anyone who has ever denigrated Mr. West's father", while his mother "is the ultimate target of his book". A critically lauded author, he wrote novels, essays, and nonfiction works, and reviewed books for
The New Yorker from the 1950s until the late 1970s. He won the
Houghton Mifflin Award for his novel
The Vintage (1949) (published in Britain as
On a Dark Night), which
Boucher and
McComas praised as "a brilliantly terrifying exploration of the theme that each age creates its own peculiar species of hell and Devil". Besides the biography
H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life, he is also known for works on history such as
Elizabethan England, and
All About the Crusades. In 1937, West married
Katharine Church; the couple had one son (Edmund West) and one daughter (Caroline Frances West) but divorced in 1952. He later married Lily Emmet. ==Works==