He was an English writer, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime. A prominent critic, Murry is best remembered for his association with Katherine Mansfield, whom he married as her second husband, in 1918, his friendship with D. H. Lawrence, and his friendship (and brief affair) with Frieda Lawrence. Following Mansfield's death, he edited her work. He was born in Peckham, London, the son of a civil servant. He was educated at Christ's Hospital and Brasenose College, Oxford. There he met the writer Joyce Cary, a lifelong friend. He met Katherine Mansfield at the end of 1911, through W. L. George. His intense relationship with her, and early death, and his subsequent allusions to it, shaped both his later life and the attitudes (often hostile) of others to him. Leonard Woolf in his memoirs called Murry "Pecksniffian". By 1933 his reputation "had touched bottom", and Rayner Heppenstall's short book of 1934, John Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality, could note that he was "the best-hated man of letters in the country". Medically certified as unfit for the military, with pleurisy and possible tuberculosis, during the war years he was part of the Garsington circle of Ottoline Morrell. In 1919, he became the editor of the Athenaeum, recently purchased by Arthur Rowntree. Under his editorship it was a literary review that featured work by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group. It lasted until 1921. It had enthusiastic support from E. M. Forster, who later wrote that "Here at last was a paper that was a pleasure to read and an honour to write for, and which linked up literature and life".