In 1938 Shute resigned from Airspeed Ltd. After publishing his third novel, Lonely Road (1932), he stopped writing to focus his attention on his new company. The project was canceled, and Shute went on to form his own company, Airspeed Ltd., in 1930. Although the R-100 flew a successful round-trip to Canada, the government version of the aircraft-known as the R-101-was poorly designed and crashed in an accident over France during its first flight. The R-100 was one-half of a two-airship project commissioned by the government. He eventually left de Havilland's to work on the R-100 airship project. His first published novel was Marazan, which appeared in 1926. At this time he wrote his first novel, Stephen Morris, which wasn't published until after his death. Desperate to fight for England, he enlisted in the infantry, but the war ended before he saw any combat.Īfter graduating from Oxford in 1923, he worked at the de Havilland Aircraft Company. He entered the Royal Military Academy and trained for several months to become a gunnery officer for the Royal Flying Corps, but a childhood stammer prevented him from getting a commission. During the fighting, Irish rebels occupied and burned his father's post office. A short time later, Shute served as a stretcher-bearer during the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland. In 1915, Shute's only brother, nineteen-year-old Fred, died in France during World War I. After moving to Dublin, Shute was sent to the Shrewsbury School in Oxford in the summer, he stayed with his family in the countryside near Dublin. In 1912 his father was appointed head of the post office in Ireland. His father, Arthur Hamilton Norway, was the assistant secretary of the General Post Office in London. Author Biographyīorn Nevil Shute Norway, Shute was born on January 17, 1899, in a suburb of London, England. On the Beach continues to sell well for a forty-year-old novel, which suggests that the moral of the story remains relevant today. Many critics hailed the book as an insightful and humane cautionary fable. In his novel, Shute focuses on a group of ordinary people who wait for the inevitable radioactive fall-out of a devastating nuclear war to arrive in Melbourne, Australia.

While Nevil Shute's On the Beach is not as well-known as these other novels, it carries a powerful message about the dangers of nuclear warfare. Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1939), and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) are prime examples of novels that realistically portray the madness and brutality of war. The antiwar novel has a grand literary tradition.

Shute nevil on the beach