Nevil Shute Biography and List of Works

British-born Australian novelist, best known for the novel ON THE BEACH (1957), which was adapted for the screen in 1959. The film became one of the most celebrated anti-Bomb films of its era. Shute was educated as an aeronautical engineer and he employs his expertise on technical issues and knowledge of aviation in his books. In addition to On The Beach his novels PIED PIPER (1942) and A TOWN LIKE ALICE (1959) have also been made into major films.

"A beautiful aircraft is the expression of the genius of a great engineer who is also a great artist. It is impossible for that man to carry out the whole of the design himself; he works through a design office staffed by a hundred draughtsmen or more. A hundred minds, each with their own less competent ideas, are striving to modify the chief designer's original conception. If the design is to appear in the end as a great artistic unity, the chief designer must be a man of immensely powerful will, capable of imposing his idea and his way of doing things on each of his hundred draughtsmen, so that each one of them is too terrified to insert any of his own ideas."
(from A Nevil Shute Omnibus, 1973)

Nevil Shute was born in Ealing, Middlesex. His father was Arthur Hamilton Norway, C.B., an assistant secretary of the General Post Office in London, and his mother was the former Mary Louisa Gadsden. Shute was educated at schools in Oxford, Shrewsbury, and Woolrich. After witnessing the Easter Rising in Dublin, where he was a volunteer stretcher-bearer, Shute entered Balliol College, Oxford. He spent the later stages of World War I in military service and continued his education in Oxford, graduating in 1922.

In 1922 Shute joined the de Havilland Aircraft Company. He worked as an aeronautical engineer, specializing in Zeppelins. Shute was a deputy chief on the Rigid Airship R1000 project, one of the last of the British airships. He flew twice to America aboard the craft. The project ended after the 1930 R101 disaster. The following year Shute founded Airspeed Ltd., an aircraft construction company, and he married Frances Mary Heaton, a doctor, with whom he had two daughters.

As a novelist Shute made his debut in 1926 with MARAZAN. It was followed by SO DISDAINED (1928), LONELY ROAD (1929) and RUINED CITY (1938). His aviation company had grown successfully, employing about a thousand people, and Shute decided to resign and devote himself entirely to writing. His novel PIED PIPER (1942) became a huge success and was adapted for the screen. The book had two sequels, PASTORAL (1944) and MOST SECRET (1945).

During WW II Shute served as a lieutenant commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and contributed to the development of a number of top-secret, specialized weapons. In 1944 he was sent to Normandy as a correspondent. In 1945 he was in Burma as a correspondent for the Ministry of Information.

From 1950 Shute permanently resided in Australia, settling on a farm at Langwarrin, Victoria. His later novels were mostly set in his new home country, among them A TOWN LIKE ALICE (1950), which tells the story of Jean Paget, a London typist, and her journey from Japanese-occupied Malaya to the Australian outback, and ON THE BEACH, a pessimistic tale of the atomic age. In the novel the feared nuclear war has eliminated all life in the northern hemisphere, leaving Australia to await the inevitable spread of radioactive contamination, that will end the rest of human life on Earth. - The theme of the end of the world has been the subject of many novels throughout literary history. Mary Shelley wrote a gloomy Great Plague story The Last Man, in 1826, the atomic bomb was depicted in H.G. Wells's The World Set Free (1914), apocalyptic visions inspired Kurt Vonnegut Jr's Cat's Cradle (1963) and Galapagos (1985), Ray Bradbury's story The Last Day, James Blish's The Triumph of Time (1958), Bernard Malamud's God's Grace (1982). - See: The End of the World, ed. by Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander (1983).

Shute's career spanned 30 years and he published 25 books, among them his autobiography SLIDE RULE in 1954. The name refers to a calculating device used by engineers before the invention of pocket calculators and computers. Shute was a fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He died on January 12, 1960, in Melbourne.

On the Beach (1959), film - dir. by Stanley Krames, starring Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins. - A pessimistic anti-Bomb film set in the year 1964. Gregory Peck is the commander of a U.S. nuclear sub that lands in Australia, the only country that has not yet been wiped out by atomic fallout. Peck has a desperate affair with the nymphomaniac Gardner - he must decide whether to die with Gardner's in Australia or go back to America so that his men can die on home soil. Gardner told reporters: for making a picture about the end of the world, "this is the place to do it." Fred Astaire played a disillusioned scientist who crystallizes the films theme: if we have nuclear weapons, they will be used, intentionally or by accident. 'Waltzing Matilda' plays throughout the film. The Pentagon refused to lend the use of an atomic submarine. Nevil Shute boycotted the entire venture. At the end of the film is seen an abandoned banner, reading 'There is still time... Brother'.

For further reading: Nevil Shute by J. Smith (1976); The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1985); World Authors 1900-1950, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996)

MARAZAN, (1926)
PASTORAL, (1944)