A Perfect Spy

John le Carré (1931 – 2020), born David John Moore Cornwell, was a British-Irish author. He spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld; at sixteen, he found refuge first at the University of Bern, then Oxford. After graduating with honors, he taught at Eton for two years before he was recruited into British Intelligence. In 1961, while still an MI6 agent, he published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, which introduced the world to George Smiley. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, spent 32 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list and earned him a reputation as one of the world’s preeminent spy novelists. Though he declined all British-based honors and prizes, he accepted the Premio Malaparte (Italy) in 1988, the title of Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 2005, and the Goethe Medal (Germany) in 2011. Over the course of sixty years, he published over two dozen novels that would come to define an age; his final novel, Silverview, was published posthumously in 2021.