John le Carré
British novelist and spy (1931–2020)
David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020), known by his pen name John le Carré ( lə-KARR-ay), was an English author.
Many of his espionage novels have been adapted for film or television. He has been described as a "sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer", and is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Near the end of his life, le Carré became an Irish citizen.
Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller, and was adapted into an award-winning film. This success allowed him to leave MI6 to become a full-time author.
His other novels that have been adapted for film or television include The Looking Glass War (1965), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1979), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), A Perfect Spy (1986), The Russia House (1989), The Night Manager (1993), The Tailor of Panama (1996), The Constant Gardener (2001), A Most Wanted Man (2008) and Our Kind of Traitor (2010). In 2008, The Times named le Carré one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945". Philip Roth said that A Perfect Spy (1986) was "the best English novel since the war".
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “John le Carré” is british novelist and spy (1931–2020). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through John, Carré and British, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “british novelist and spy (1931–2020)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q209641. VIAF identifies the subject as 109254932. The Library of Congress control number is n79083252. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931, 2020, 1963 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “John le Carré” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.