Comfort , Alexander , 1920-2000 , poet and novelist

Born in London, 1920; educated at Highgate School, Trinity College Cambridge (Robert Styring Scholar, Classics, and Senior Scholar, Natural Sciences), and the London Hospital (Scholar); visited Buenos Aires and West Africa, 1936; refused military service in World War Two, 1939-1945; 1st Class Natural Science Tripos, Part I, 1940; 2nd Class Natural Science Tripos, 1st Division (Pathology), 1941; BA, 1943; married Ruth Muriel Harris, 1943; Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, Cambridge, 1944; Member of the Royal College of Surgeons and Licentiate, Royal College of Physicians, London, 1944; MA, Cambridge, 1945; Diploma in Child Health, London, 1945; one son, Nicholas, born, 1946; Lecturer in Physiology, London Hospital Medical College, 1948-1951; PhD in Biochemistry, London, 1949; Honorary Research Associate, Department of Zoology, University College London, 1951-1973; DSc in Gerontology, London, 1963; Director of Research in Gerontology, Zoology Department, University College London, 1966-1973; President, British Society for Research on Ageing, 1967; first marriage dissolved and married Jane Tristram Henderson (d 1991), 1973; Clinical Lecturer, Department of Psychiatry, Stanford University, 1974-1983; Professor, Department of Pathology, University of California School of Medicine, Irvine, 1976-1978; Consultant psychiatrist, Brentwood VA Hospital, Los Angeles, 1978-1981; Adjunct Professor, Neuropsychiatric Institute, University of California at Los Angeles, from 1980; Consultant, Ventura County Hospital (Medical Education), from 1981; member of the Royal Society of Medicine; member of the American Psychiatric Association; a prolific author, best known for books on sexual behaviour - in which he advocated greater sexual freedom, including the bestselling and widely translated The Joy of Sex and its sequels - but wrote on a diverse range of subjects; an anarchist, and published works on anarchy; a pacifist, and active in the movement for nuclear disarmament; died in Banbury, Oxfordshire, 2000. Publications include: Fiction: No Such Liberty (1941); The Almond Tree (1943); The Powerhouse (1944); Letters from an Outpost (1947); On This Side Nothing (1949); A Giant's Strength (1952); Come Out to Play (1961); Tetrarch (1980); Imperial Patient (1987); The Philosophers (1989). Poetry: France and Other Poems (1942); A Wreath for the Living (1943); Elegies (1944); The Song of Lazarus (USA, 1945); The Signal to Engage (1947); And All But He Departed (1951); Haste to the Wedding (1961); Poems (1979); Mikrokosmos (1994). Plays: Into Egypt (1942); Cities of the Plain (1943); Gengulphus (1948). Songs: Are You Sitting Comfortably? (1962). Non-fiction: The Silver River (1938); Art and Social Responsibility (1946); First Year Physiological Technique (1948); The Novel and Our Time (1948); Barbarism and Sexual Freedom (1948); Sexual Behaviour in Society (1950); The Pattern of the Future (1950); Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State (1950); The Biology of Senescence (1956); Darwin and the Naked Lady (1961); Sex in Society (1963); Ageing, the Biology of Senescence (1964); The Process of Ageing (1964); Nature and Human Nature (1966); The Anxiety Makers (1967); The Joy of Sex (1972); More Joy (1974); A Good Age (1977); as editor, Sexual Consequences of Disability (1978); I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion (1979); A practice of Geriatric Psychiatry (1979); The Facts of Love (1980); What is a Doctor? (1980); Reality and Empathy (1984); with Jane T Comfort, What about Alcohol? (1983); The New Joy of Sex (1991); Against Power and Death (1994). Translation: The Koka Shastra (1964).