David Nobbs was born in Orpington, in the English county of Kent, in March 1935. Despite being the son and grandson of teachers, never in his life did he even have time to think about dedicating himself to teaching. After doing military service in the railroad corps and becoming a highwayman, he studied classical languages in Cambridge and began writing. He even planned to move to Vienna (then the cheapest city in Europe), rent an attic and become a starving novelist. Fortunately, he got the opportunity to work in a small newspaper in Sheffield, where he began a faltering career as a reporter. The author himself would later claim that he was probably the most lousy journalist in the history of England. In fact, he spent his days drinking pint after pint in the neighborhood pub and writing unpublishable plays. Endowed with a bomb-proof comic, he soon began collaborating as a screenwriter for several BBC humor shows. In 1965, when her first novel, The Itinerant Lodger, came out, the Daily Telegraph literally said of her that "presumably, it was a funny story." The success, nevertheless, would arrive to him in 1975 with the publication of Fall and boom of Reginald Perrin, that knew a sequel in the return of Reginald Perrin (1977) and in The Better World of Reginald Perrin (1978). The character of Reggie Perrin, who became immortally famous, and who even created a school among the new generation of British authors of the eighties, would be recovered in 1995 in The Legacy of Reginald Perrin. Currently, David Nobbs lives with his second wife in a beautiful house on the hills of North Yorkshire. He continues to love discovering rural pubs, and is a staunch supporter of Hereford United.
