Against the backdrop of an English country hotel in a languid pre-war summer, Denton Welch's alter ego, Orvil Pym, examines his early life and formative experiences with a Proustian intensity. An adolescent voyeur, Orvil takes pleasure in the microscopic observation of his relatives and fellow guests, charting their eccentricities and love affairs as faithfully as he exposes his own obsessions. In a highly perceptive Afterword, Jeremy Reed relates the novel to Welch's life and work, praising it for writing that 'oscillates between moments of lyrical serenity and outbreaks of psychological disorder.' Flagrantly controversial on its first publication in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure will impress new readers with its arresting visual descriptions and its defiance of convention.

In Youth Is Pleasure

Welch, Denton

Oxford Univ. Press

'Unlike any other person I had come across, Welch seemed to be speaking particularly to me' Alan Bennett\n'Vivid ... surprising ... an exquisite balance of pain and beauty' Guardian\nOrvil Pym does not fit in. A waifish, eccentric, sensitive fifteen-year-old, he hates school and longs to be alone. Spending his Summer holidays in a genteel Surrey hotel with his mysterious father and two brothers who don't understand him, he explores ancient churches, spies on a man rowing in the river and collects antiques, escaping into his own singular aesthetic world. First published in 1945, this is an unforgettable portrayal of a young man's sensuous coming-of-age.\n'A heightened, sensual journey ... it is Orvil's vibrant energy that allows this book to bubble ... beautifully odd ... spectacular' Independent

In Youth is Pleasure

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Penguin Classics

First published in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure is a beautiful and unassuming coming-of-age novel by the English writer and painter Denton Welch (1915-1948). Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is 15 years old, and this novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school--but as in all of Welch's work, what is most important are the details of his characters' surroundings. Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as William S. Burroughs wrote, "makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes." Film director John Waters includes this novel as one of his "Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Bascially the Matter with You," and writes: "Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger." Also included in this edition is the first U.S. publication of "I Left My Grandfather's House." This first-person account of an idyllic walking tour in the British countryside undertaken when Welch was 18 makes a fascinating companion piece to the fictionalized, though no less autobiographical, In Youth Is Pleasure.

Plume

After I had run away from school, no one knew what to do with me. . .' Born in Shanghai in 1915, son of a wealthy rubber merchant, Denton Welch was dispatched to an English boarding school after his mother's death. There he suffered, and soon absconded, forcing his father to bring him back to Shanghai where further travels and adventures ensued. Maiden Voyage (1943) is Welch's semi-novelistic, beautifully observed account of these formative experiences. 'Denton Welch's subject matter had a richness and a colour that links him with very unlike writers, such as Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell and Christopher Fry, all of whom were standing out against the drabness of their times.' Alan Bennett 'Such a marvelous writer.' William S Burroughs

Maiden voyage

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

FABER

After I had run away from school, no one knew what to do with me. . .' Born in Shanghai in 1915, son of a wealthy rubber merchant, Denton Welch was dispatched to an English boarding school after his mother's death. There he suffered, and soon absconded, forcing his father to bring him back to Shanghai where further travels and adventures ensued. Maiden Voyage (1943) is Welch's semi-novelistic, beautifully observed account of these formative experiences. 'Denton Welch's subject matter had a richness and a colour that links him with very unlike writers, such as Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell and Christopher Fry, all of whom were standing out against the drabness of their times.' Alan Bennett 'Such a marvelous writer.' William S Burroughs

Maiden Voyage

Faber and Faber

In the last eight years of his life - and he died when he was only thirty-three - Denton Welch wrote three novels, umpteen short stories, hundreds of poems, and - between 1942 and 1948, a profoundly personal and moving journal that recorded his swift maturity into a writer of genius. Therein he wrote of his battle with ill-health, his life lived in claustrophobic rooms, and (in frank, erotic terms) his frustrated pursuit of the 'ideal friend.' And yet he encountered some of the foremost writers of his time - Edith Sitwell, Herbert Read, Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville West - and recorded every aspect of life with a fresh and arresting sensitivity.

Journals

Denton Welch at 20 years was in an accident that changed his path in life,he was a painter,who turned into writingjournals/novels.As he wrote in his journal one could begin to see revealing aspects of his own personal life of sensitivity, snobbery sexual ambiguity and his appetite for a life that was slipping away.He died at age 33. (He had written many books/journals during those 13 years that he lived after the accident).

The Journals of Denton Welch

Allison Busby

For this fifth volume in the Four Corners Familiars series, in which artists respond to literary classics, the young San Francisco artist Colter Jacobsen (born 1975) has chosen four absolute masterpieces of short fiction: Jane Bowles' “A Stick of Green Candy” and “Camp Cataract,” and Denton Welch's “The Trout Stream” and “Narcissus Bay.” Bowles (1917–1973) and Welch (1915–1948) share a perceptiveness and surgical lucidity for moods and surfaces that William Burroughs, a fan of both authors, remarked upon: “both writers are masters of the unforgettable phrase that no one else could have written… each has a very special way of seeing things.” Jacobsen, who has previously collaborated with the writers Bill Berkson and Kevin Killian, and whose paired drawings―one drawn from life, the other from memory―demonstrate a flair and desire for response and collaboration, adds to these stories his marginalia, chapter headings and paired drawings, making of the whole an enticing mesh of sympathies.

The Trout Stream/A Stick of Green Candy/Narcissus Bay/Camp Cataract (Four Corners Familiars)

Arts & Photography

BOWLES, Jane

Individual Artists

Four Corners Books

One of the most beautifully peceptive novels in the English language, A Voice through a Cloud is a devastating account of vulnerability, gay desire and determination 
A Voice through a Cloud is English novelist Denton Welch's moving account of his recovery from a bicycling accident that left him partially paralyzed at the age of 20. Espouser of picnics and bicycle rides, cataloger of exquisite textures, pitiless surgeon of affect and mores, and also a pretty good painter, Denton Welch has drawn fans as far removed from his world of English pastoralism as William Burroughs and Richard Hell. Characterized by Welch's mercilessly acute powers of observation, A Voice Through a Cloud is a tour-de-force of both rigorous, detached self-analysis and clear-eyed external description, as Welch lies in a hospital bed, struggling with his illness and his relationships with family and doctor. Completed as Welch was dying 13 years later from complications resulting from the accident, and first published in 1950, A Voice through a Cloud's pristine prose sparkles with gleaming surfaces, human motivations clearly perceived and a steadiness of tone and register. While In Youth Is Pleasure is probably Welch's best-loved book, and Maiden Voyage his most scandalous, A Voice through a Cloud is his masterpiece, containing his most accomplished writing.

A Voice Through a Cloud

Exact Change

Maiden Voyage is an account of author Denton Welch’s sixteenth year, when he ran away from his English public school and was then sent to Shanghai to live with his father. The book was Welch’s first and created a sensation on publication in 1943; its frank description of public schoolboy life forced publisher Herbert Read to initially seek advice from libel lawyers. Even Winston Churchill’s private secretary gossiped in a letter that, “the book was reeking with homosexuality? I think I must get it.” Today, Welch’s expressions of sexuality may seem more demure than outrageous, but his portrayal of the passions and humiliations of adolescence is graphic. As in all of Welch’s novels, it is the precisely realized details of the author’s physical and social surroundings that make the book such a remarkable journey.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Welch, Denton. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Welch, Denton

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Welch, Denton. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

In Youth Is Pleasure

In Youth is Pleasure

In Youth Is Pleasure

Maiden voyage

Maiden Voyage

Journals

The Journals of Denton Welch

The Trout Stream/A Stick of Green Candy/Narcissus Bay/Camp Cataract (Four Corners Familiars)

A Voice Through a Cloud

Maiden Voyage