On the Run with Mary - Jonathan Barrow

Jonathan Barrow was born in 1947, an hour's drive north of London in Sawbridgeworth, England, the youngest of five brothers. He attended Harrow, the boarding school whose alumni include Winston Churchill and Lord Byron, but never completed his secondary education. Barrow worked at the Dorchester and Claridge's hotels in London before being hired as an advertising copywriter. He published short stories-keenly observed, outrageously inventive parodies of English snobbishness and eccentricities-in The London Magazine and exhibited his drawings at London's Redfern Gallery, which has represented leading British artists like Henry Moore and David Hockney. His brother found the closely-typed, much scribbled-upon manuscript of On the Run with Mary in Barrow's office drawer the day after the author's death in 1970, at age twenty-two. He died in a car crash alongside his fianc?e, two weeks before they were to be married. This book, in which the narrator witnesses and uncannily prophesies what was planned as a wedding turn into a funeral, can be seen as both protracted suicide note and feverish love letter.