'Towards the end of 1943, I decided to give up my job in the BBC," wrote George Orwell in As I Pleased (1947), "and I was asked to take over the literary editorship of Tribune, in place of John Atkins, who was expecting call-up." Indeed he was. John Atkins, who has died aged 92, spent a lifetime in literary pursuits and, in the 1940s was also a friend of John Braine, then a Bingley librarian, later author of Room at the Top, and of Dylan Thomas. The Welshman liked John's integrity and they played darts together.
Having published a short poetry work, Experience of England (1942), and a piece of fiction, The Diary of William Carpenter (1943), John was posted to Wales with the Royal Artillery. The writer JB Pick said John was willing to fight Hitler but, finding the army intolerable, went absent without leave frequently. He would return within 20 days to avoid a desertion charge.
Pick recalled how, in 1945, John, while awol, stayed, amid the bombsites, at a dilapidated 170 Westbourne Terrace (demolished in the 1960s) behind Paddington station. Fellow attic inmates included Alfred Perlès, Austrian writer and associate of Henry Miller, Andre Wendt, German anarchist, fresh out of Wormwood Scrubs, and the pacifist and future film-maker, Stephen Peet, who had just been released from a German PoW camp. Once John borrowed a pair of Peet's trousers. He had been wearing his wife's which, lacking fly-buttons, were a trifle conspicuous.
John said he had a "perfectly jolly time" when he was in army detention, but was also, as a university graduate, offered a commission. This he rejected and was thus sent to a psychiatrist, who, John said, was mad. After victory in Europe the army discharged him.
After the war his career took in non-fiction, novels, poems, plays and teaching. In 1947 he published a study of Walter de la Mare. The Art of Ernest Hemingway followed in 1952, then George Orwell: A Literary Study (1954). Tomorrow Revealed (1955) drew on prophetic and utopian writing. There were studies of Graham Greene (1957), Aldous Huxley (1968) and JB Priestley (1981), and a four-volume Sex in Literature (1970-78) and The British Spy Novel (1984). Fiction included Cat on Hot Bricks (1950), Rain and the River (1953), and (with Pick), A Land Fit for 'eros (1957).
John was born in Carshalton, Surrey. His mother became a headteacher, his father, whom he met rarely, was an insurance agent. After Sir John Leman school in Beccles, Suffolk, John graduated in history from Bristol University in 1938. He worked for Mass Observation, and started as an assistant editor on Tribune, then edited by Raymond Postgate. Orwell described it as the only weekly "that makes a genuine effort to be both progressive and humane".
In the later 1940s John became a West Country Workers' Education Association teacher and organiser. He also contributed to Penguin New Writing.
He then taught in the Sudan (1951-55, 1958-68). Friendships persisted - while filming in Khartoum, Peet stayed with John. After teaching in Benghazi in Libya (1968-70) and Lodz University in Poland (1970-76), John settled in Colchester. Whatever country John visited, Pick noted, "suffered some sort of revolution soon afterwards".
Several of John's books were published by Calder & Boyars and later by John Calder. For me, John's need to self-publish The Golden Imp (1995) says more about the business than about his ability. Set in a semi-mythical 1930s, The Golden Imp is a lovely story, displaying his knowledge of Norfolk people - and it became popular across East Anglia.
At the end of the 1990s, the actor Ken Campbell, John and I met in one of Campbell's favourite Italian cafes in the West End of London. John shared with Campbell (who died last year) a fascination with Fortean Times and multiverses. I had taken John to see Campbell in the play Art, and it was between Saturday performances. By now I suppose they are continuing their conversation about infinity with greater insight.
John was inspiring. He knew how to encourage people to talk, or say their piece, or read poetry aloud. He was a thoroughly pleasant man and modest with it, with his conversation illuminated by vast knowledge. His literary quest never ended.
In 1938 he met Joan Grey, an artist, in Bristol, and they married two years later. She died in 1993. He is survived by their two daughters Pauline and Jo.
• John Alfred Atkins, writer and teacher, born 26 May 1916; died 31 March 2009
