Auden, Wystan Hugh

English author born in York. His father was a doctor, and he was brought up in an intellectual, middle-class family in Solihull near Birmingham, surrounded by a landscape that inspired his poetry. He was educated at Gresham's School in Norfolk, which was known for its liberal ideas on education and read English literature at Christ Church College, Oxford, in the 1920s with mediocre results. In 1928–1929 he benefited from a liberating year in Berlin. During the 1930s he became the central figure of a group of leftist intellectuals that also included Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. All three were members of The Group Theatre, an avant-garde, experimental drama group that was founded in 1932 by Rupert Doone and that also included T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Britten and Henry Moore.