For the first few months after graduating Larkin devoted most of his time to his first novel, 'Jill'. He graduated with first class honours in English (1943). In 1940, he attended St Johns College and soon after his first poem 'Ultimatum' was published in the national weekly. He showed an early talent for writing when he attended King Henry VIII School and contributed regularly to the school magazine.

AndrewMotion's engrossing portrait shows us a complex and contradictory man of genius, warts and all, in the throes of creating poetry of greatness.Larkin was born in Coventry on 9th August 1922 to Sydney and Eva Larkin. Though shy and to some forbidding, this lifelong librarian had a strong talent for friendship and a sharp, ribald wit. Over and over in the course of his life, Larkin would find himself holding lovers - sometimes, to his dismay or bemusement, more than one at a time - at arm's length, retreating into an intermittent misogyny in his struggle to focus his emotional life in his work. He found family life constraining and repressive, and much of his adult life was a seesaw between his strong sensual appetite and need for affection and the fear of entrapment and encroachment on his writing life that love and marriage represented. Even before he was twenty, Larkin formed close friendships with other aspiring writers, painters, and musicians.

Larkin's friend and fellow poet Andrew Motion has drawn deeply from this rich lode of previously unknown and unpublished material and from conversations with those who knew Larkin best, to give us an intimate and detailed portrait - the first, and undoubtedly the definitive, biography of this great poet. Instead, be left behind him an archival treasure trove, a cache of letters, journals, and papers that reveal a man who, from very early on, made art, especially poetry, his aspiration and believed himself destined for fame. At sixty he promised that as soon as he saw 'the Grim Reaper coming up the path' he would burn all his personal papers. Living in towns 'where only salesmen and relations come', refusing to read or lecture before an audience, he was by the end of his life affectionately known as 'the hermit of Hull'. Philip Larkin was one of the greatest and most popular English poets of the twentieth century, and also one of the most private.

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