Vivian de Sola Pinto, 1895-1969

Vivian de Sola Pinto was born in 1895 and educated at Christchurch College, Oxford where he read classics. His studies were interrupted by the First World War. He volunteered for service and fought in Gallipoli, Sinai, and France, where he became a friend of the English poet, Siegfried Sassoon. He returned to Oxford in 1919, and graduated with a first class honours degree in 1921. After working at the Sorbonne and then in the extra-mural department at University College Nottingham, he was appointed to the chair of English at Southampton in 1926. He left his post in 1938 to take up the chair in English at Nottingham where he remained until his retirement in 1961. He died on 27 July 1969.

Pinto had a wide range of research interests in English literature, with a particular concentration on the 17th-century Restoration poets. On his appointment at Nottingham in 1938 he took a strong personal interest in the local writer D.H. Lawrence and was a major influence on the development of Lawrence studies at Nottingham and the establishment of a collection of Lawrence manuscripts in the University Library. He invited F.R. Leavis to Nottingham to lecture on Lawrence, and was largely responsible for organising the 1960 first major exhibition of Lawrence works at Nottingham.

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