Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
by Jonathan Coe
Summary
A biography of the experimental British novelist B.S. Johnson, who killed himself in 1973 at forty years old, that deliberately adopts the fragmented, self questioning formal strategies of its subject's own fiction. Coe weaves together interviews, letters, unpublished manuscripts, and his own commentary to argue that Johnson was a seriously undervalued innovator whose work deserves a permanent place in the literary canon. The book is both a rigorous critical reconsideration and an elegy, and it succeeded in reviving significant interest in Johnson's novels.
Historical Context & Significance
B.S. Johnson died in 1973 believing his experimental novels had been ignored by critics and the public; Coe's biography — which won the then titled Samuel Johnson Prize — triggered the republication of all seven of Johnson's novels and established him as a major figure in British literary modernism.