JOHN BERGER

Investigating a writer’s vision.

In his debut biography, Overton, archivist of the papers of John Berger (1926-2017) at the British Library and editor of several collections of his essays, draws on a trove of primary sources, interviews, and his personal relationship with Berger to create a perceptive portrait of the influential painter, novelist, and critic. Berger was born in London to Jewish, lower-middle-class parents who were ambitious for their son’s future: They sent him to boarding school; he won a partial scholarship to St Edward’s School, Oxford, a public school that his father hoped would help him to “get on.” Sensitive to the constrictions and injustices of a class system, Berger came to define himself as a Romantic Marxist, someone with “an aversion to political power whatever its form.” Not surprisingly, he saw himself also as an artist. In 1942, he won a scholarship to the Central School of Arts and Crafts and, after the war, received a small monthly stipend to the Chelsea Polytechnic Art School. Producing art, though, did not make his reputation—responding to art did. In 1950, he applied his talents as a speaker and scriptwriter to 10-minute talks about paintings for the BBC West African Service. Subsequent radio and television shows followed. Berger, Overton notes, “became a TV personality before he became a published novelist.” He offers a close reading of Berger’s eclectic oeuvre—“a long life of short books”—that includes Ways of Seeing (1972), which became a BBC television series, and the Booker Prize–winning novel G. (1972). His was “a career of constant shifts,” Overton writes, during which Berger found “new forms for what he wanted to say.” Intellectual influences, personal entanglements, fatherhood, and physical decline all factor into Overton’s thorough recounting of a richly productive life.

An authoritative, nuanced biography.