Born in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, into a family of physicians, Warwick Deeping was educated at Merchant Taylors' School. He proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study medicine and science, then went to Middlesex Hospital to finish his medical training. During the First World War, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Deeping later gave up his job as a physician to become a full-time writer. He married Phyllis Maude Merrill and lived for the rest of his life in "Eastlands" on Brooklands Road, Weybridge, Surrey. He was one of the best-selling authors of the 1920s and 1930s, with seven of his novels making the best-seller list. Deeping was a prolific writer of short stories, which appeared in such British magazines as Cassell's, The Story-Teller, and The Strand. He also published fiction in several US magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post and Adventure. All of the short stories and serialised novels in US magazines were reprints of works previously published in Britain. Well over 200 of his original short stories and essays that appeared in various British fiction magazines were never seen in book form. Those works are now available in the multi-volume "Lost Stories" collection.
Themes
Deeping's early work is dominated by historicalromances. His later novels more usually dealt with modern life, and were critical of many tendencies of twentieth-century civilisation. His standpoint was generally that of a passionate individualism, distrustful both of ruling elites and of the lower classes, who were often presented as a threat to his embattled middle-class protagonists. His most celebrated hero is Captain Sorrell M.C., the ex-officer who after the First World War is reduced to a menial occupation in which he is bullied by those of a lower social class and less education. Deeping's novels often deal with controversial issues. In her 2009 study, The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping, Mary Grover lists these:
Despite his use of controversial themes, Deeping received little recognition as a serious writer. George Orwell, whose political beliefs were very different from Deeping's, and who in his disdain for Deeping's work was typical of highbrow left-wing critics of the time, such as F.R. Leavis, dismissed him as being among the 'huge tribe' of writers who 'simply don't notice what is happening'. Graham Greene also criticized Deeping's work; in his book Journey Without Maps Greene includes Deeping's novels on a list of books "written without truth, without compulsion, one dull word following another." By contrast, Kingsley Amis gave some guarded praise for Deeping's work. Amis read Deeping's Sorrell and Son and initially disliked the book. However, in a later interview Amis praised Sorrell and Son, saying "Its sensibility was very crude but it delivered".
The Lost Stories of Warwick Deeping – Volumes I – VI – A total of over 3000 pages, containing over 200 short stories, novellas, and essays. These works were never published in book form and only appeared in British and American fiction magazines in the 1910s-1930s, such as The Story-Teller, The New Magazine, Cassell's Magazine of Fiction, and The Strand.
Films
Movies based on Deeping's novels belong, with two exceptions, to the silent era. Unrest was filmed in 1920, Fox Farm in 1922, and Doomsday in 1928. Kitty, directed by Victor Saville, was one of the first British talkies. Sorrell and Son was filmed three times: It first appeared in 1927 as a silent movie, was remadein 1934 as a sound film, and turned into a TV mini-series in 1984.
