Anthony West (author)

In 1955, Anthony West wrote a novel Heritage, which was technically fiction, but which dealt with the trials of a boy who grows up largely neglected and ignored by his famous parents. This work was a thinly disguised autobiography (a roman à clef). In it, his mother appeared much worse than his father, whom he admired all his life. She fell out with him over it, famously threatening to sue if the book was published in Britain. It was not published in Britain until 1984, after she had died. Another one of Anthony West's best-known books is H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life, a biography of his father.

A critically lauded author, he wrote novels, essays, and nonfiction works, and reviewed books for The New Yorker from the 1950s until the late 1970s. He won the Houghton Mifflin Award for his novel The Vintage (1949) (published in Britain as On a Dark Night), which Boucher and McComas praised as "a brilliantly terrifying exploration of the theme that each age creates its own peculiar species of hell and Devil". He is also known for works on history such as Elizabethan England, and All About the Crusades.

West was born Anthony Panther West Fairfield, the son of British authors Rebecca West and H. G. Wells. His parents never married, as Wells was already married to someone else, and remained so until after his intimate relationship with West ended (although they remained friends until his death in 1946).

In 1937, West married Katharine Church; the couple had one son (Edmund West) and one daughter (Caroline Frances West) but divorced in 1952. He later married Lily Emmet.

Anthony West (4 August 1914 – 27 December 1987) was an English author and literary critic.