An account of a young English undergraduate from the provinces, this portrait of Oxford during the war is now regarded by many critics as a classic of its kind.

The novel is set in the wartime Oxford in which it was written. Protagonist John Kemp is a young man from "Huddlesford" in Lancashire, who comes up to Oxford. With great sympathy it analyses his emotions at this first experience of privileged southern life (he has previously never been south of Crewe). Socially awkward and inexperienced, he is attracted by the reckless and dissipated life of his roommate Christopher Warner, a well-off southerner who has attended a minor public school, tellingly called "Lamprey College".

Philip Arthur Larkin (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the 20th century.

Larkin was born to Sydney and Eva Larkin in Coventry, a large provincial city in the English Midlands. He was educated at King Henry VIII School in Coventry, and St. John's College, Oxford, where he met Kingsley Amis, a lifelong friend and frequent correspondent. In late 1943, soon after graduating from Oxford, he applied for, and was appointed to, the position of municipal librarian at Wellington, Shropshire. In 1946, he became assistant librarian at University College, Leicester (Kingsley Amis got his idea for Lucky Jim on visiting Larkin and seeing the common room of Leicester University). In March 1955, Larkin became librarian at the University of Hull, a position in which he remained until his death.