le Carré, John (lə kärā`), pseud. of David John Moore Cornwell, b. 1931–, English novelist, b. Poole, Dorset, grad. Oxford, 1956. He was a tutor at Eton College (1956–58), subsequently working for the British Foreign Service in Germany (1961–64). Le Carré's best-known novel is The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963, film 1965), a bleak study of cold-war cold war, term used to describe the shifting struggle for power and prestige between the Western powers and the Communist bloc from the end of World War II until 1989.
..... Click the link for more information. espionage that emphasizes the inhumanity and amorality of international intrigue; it introduced the figure of George Smiley, who is a recurring character in his works and in the British television miniseries adapted from them. His other novels include A Call for the Dead (1961), A Small Town in Germany (1968), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1980), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), A Perfect Spy (1986), and The Russia House (1989), the last of his novels to explore cold-war subjects exclusively. Later novels have evinced le Carré's accustomed tragic moral vision while dealing with such themes as international finance in Single & Single (1999), the arms trade in The Night Manager (1999), the exploitation of the Third World by multinational corporations in The Constant Gardener (2001), espionage old and new, terrorism, and the Iraq war in Absolute Friends (2003), and the nexus of multinational corporations and government in Africa in The Mission Song (2006).

Bibliography

See study by P. Wolfe (1987).

Le Carré, John

orig. David John Moore Cornwell

(born Oct. 19, 1931, Poole, Dorset, Eng.) British novelist. As a member of the foreign service in West Germany from 1959, he acquired firsthand knowledge of international espionage. He began to write full-time after the success of his third novel, the realistic, suspenseful The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). The trilogy Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and Smiley's People (1980) centres on the intelligence agent George Smiley. Unlike other fictional spies, Smiley is decidedly unglamorous, lonely, and alienated. Le Carré's other novels include The Little Drummer Girl (1983), The Russia House (1989), and The Night Manager (1993). Many of his books were adapted for film or television.