James Courage: A Bibliography: A Checklist of Published Primary and Secondary Sources, 1925-1986 (Part II: CRITICISM & C‪)‬

James Francis Courage was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 9 February 1903. His father Frank Courage owned the Seadown sheep station near Amberley in North Canterbury. James was educated at Christ's College (1916-21), and at St John's College, Oxford University (1923-27). Thereafter, apart from a visit to New Zealand from November 1933 to May 1935, he lived in England for the rest of his life. In the 1940s he worked in a bookshop in Hampstead, London, and from 1946 was its manager. But his health had never been strong. In the early 1930s he contracted tuberculosis, and in 1951 suffered the first of a series of bouts of severe depression. After this bout he devoted himself full-time to writing novels, short stories, plays and some poetry. He died of a heart attack on 9 October 1963. The present bibliography is inevitably incomplete in some respects, due to difficulties in access to sources, notably his earlier writings, including those published while a student at Oxford; and it lacks some publication details for several short stories, and reviews.