John Carey (critic)

John Carey
Professor John Carey
Born	(1934-04-05) 5 April 1934 (age 82) Barnes, London
Occupation	Literary critic
Language	English
Nationality	British
Alma mater	St John's College, Oxford
Notable works	What Good are the Arts?
Spouse	Gill (1960–present)
Children	Leo & Thomas
Website
www.johncarey.org

John Carey (born 5 April 1934) is a British literary critic, and post-retirement (2002) emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He is known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expounded in several books. He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2004, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.

He was born in Barnes, London, and educated at Richmond and East Sheen Boys' Grammar School, winning an Open Scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. He has held posts in a number of Oxford colleges, and is an emeritus fellow of Merton, where he became a Professor in 1975, retiring in 2002.

He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2004, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. He is chief book reviewer for the London Sunday Times and appears in radio and TV programmes such as Saturday Review and Newsnight Review.

He is known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expressed for example in his book What Good Are the Arts? (2005). Carey's 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 was a critique of Modernist writers (particularly T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence and H. G. Wells) for what Carey claims were their elitist and misanthropic views of mass society. In his review of the book Geoff Dyer claimed that Carey picked out negative quotations from his subjects.Stefan Collini responded that disdain for mass culture amongst some Modernist writers was already well-known among literary historians.