lə kärāˈ, pseud. of David John Moore Cornwell, b. 1931–, English novelist, b. Poole, Dorset, grad. Oxford, 1956. He was a tutor at Eton College (1956–58), subsequently working for the British Foreign Service in Germany (1961–64). Le Carré's best-known novel is The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), a bleak and terrifying study of cold-war espionage that emphasizes the inhumanity and amorality of international intrigue; it introduced the figure of George Smiley, who is a recurring character in his works and in the acclaimed British television series adapted from them. His other novels include A Call for the Dead (1961), A Small Town in Germany (1968), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1980), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), A Perfect Spy (1986), and The Russia House (1989), the last of his novels to exclusively explore cold-war subjects. Later novels have evinced le Carré's accustomed tragic moral visiion while dealing with such themes as international finance in Single & Single (1999), the arms trade in The Night Manager (1999), the exploitation of the Third World by multinational corporations in The Constant Gardener (2001), and espionage old and new, terrorism, and the Iraq war in Absolute Friends (2003).

See study by P. Wolfe (1987).

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