DAICHES, DAVID

DAICHES, DAVID (1912–2005), English scholar and literary critic. A son of Rabbi Salis Daiches (1880–1945), he was born in Sunderland, and spent most of his youth in Edinburgh. After teaching at Chicago, Cornell, and Cambridge universities he was appointed professor of English and dean of the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex on its foundation in 1961. His works include Robert Burns (1952), Poetry and the Modern World (1940), and Critical Approaches to Literature (1956). He also published Literary Essays, More Literary Essays, and The Novel and the Modern World (all 1969), studies of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. In his autobiography Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood (1956), Daiches records his own rebellion against Orthodox Judaism, represented for him by his father, whom he deeply admired. Daiches maintained an interest in Hebraic matters in his scholarly writings, notably in his study The King James Version of the English Bible (1941). Daiches also produced another volume of autobiography, Promised Lands: A Portrait of My Father (1997). -ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: ODNB online for Salis Daiches. (Murray Roston)