Short answers, pulled from the story.
Philip Arthur Larkin was born on the 9th of August 1922 at 2 Poultney Road in the Radford district of Coventry. He grew up as the only son and younger child of Sydney Larkin and Eva Emily Day in a large three-storey middle-class house near King Henry VIII School until he was five years old.
Philip Larkin became University Librarian at the University of Hull in 1955 and held this post until his death thirty years later. During his tenure he transformed the Brynmor Jones Library through administrative efficiency and modernization while computerizing records for the entire library stock ten years after completion.
The bulk of The Less Deceived published in November 1955 was written during five years in Belfast though eight of the twenty-nine poems came from the late 1940s. Jean Hartley described his work as a piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent combining ordinary colloquial language with ironic understatement.
A statue by Martin Jennings was unveiled on the 2nd of December 2010 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Philip Larkin's death. It is inscribed That Whitsun I was late getting away from poem The Whitsun Weddings costing £100,000 raised through charity events auctions with support from Hull City Council.
Posthumous publication by Anthony Thwaite in 1992 triggered controversy about his personal life and political views through letters revealing private opinions on race gender and sexuality. Lisa Jardine called him a casual habitual racist and an easy misogynist while John Osborne argued in 2008 that worst discoveries were some crass letters softer than mainstream entertainment.