Novelist, born in Liverpool, Merseyside, NW England, UK. He studied at Cambridge, abandoned law for literature, and wrote three novels, and a play, The Visitors, which reached the London stage. During World War 2 he served in the navy, and out of his experiences emerged his best-selling novel, The Cruel Sea (1951, filmed 1953). The Story of Esther Costello (1953) repeated that success, followed by The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1956) and The Pillow Fight (1965). He settled in Ottawa, Canada, as director of the UK Information Office (19536), after holding a similar post in South Africa. He wrote a two-volume autobiography Life is a Four-Letter Word (1966, 1970).
Nicholas John Turney Monsarrat (22 March 1910 – 8 August 1979) was a UK novelist best known today for his sea stories, particularly The Cruel Sea (1951).
Life
Born in Liverpool, Monsarrat attended Cambridge University with the intention of practicing law.
Though a pacifist, Monsarrat served in World War II, first as a member of an ambulance brigade and then as a member of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Monsarrat ended the war as commander of a frigate, and drew on his wartime experience in his postwar sea stories.
Resigning his wartime commission in 1946, Monsarrat entered the diplomatic service.
Work
Monsarrat's first three novels, published in 1934–1937 and now out of print, were realistic treatments of modern social problems informed by his leftist politics.
The Cruel Sea (1951), Monsarrat's first postwar novel, is widely regarded as his finest work, and is the only one of his novels that is still widely read. It was one of the first novels to depict life aboard the vital, but unglamorous, "small ships" of World War II—ships for which the sea was as much a threat as the Germans.
The similar Three Corvettes (1945 and 1953) comprising H.M.Corvette (Flower class in the North Atlantic), East Coast Corvette (as First Officer of HMS Guillemot) and Corvette Command (as Commanding Officer of HMS Winger) is actually an anthology of three true-experience stories published by him during the war years and shows appropriate care for what the Censor might say.
Monsarrat's other novels use a variety of settings, themes, and styles. Several have peripheral connections to the sea: The Nylon Pirates (1960) tells a story of piracy aboard a modern ocean liner, and A Fair Day's Work (1964) deals with labor unrest in a shipyard. His final work, unfinished at the time of his death but published in its incomplete form, was a two-volume historical novel titled The Master Mariner. Based on the legend of the Wandering Jew, it told the story of an Elizabethan English seaman who, as punishment for a terrible act of cowardice, is doomed to sail the world's seas until the end of time. Reincarnating his hero at critical moments in history, Monsarrat used him to illustrate the central role of seamen.
After his death the Royal Navy co-operated with his wish to be buried at sea.
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