Philip Callow was a novelist, short story writer, poet, memoirist and biographer. He was perhaps best known for a trilogy of novels about working-class life in the Midlands, which speak eloquently of the meaninglessness and conformity of areas of the society of his day. They were an example of Callow’s seizing the chance in writing “to reclaim the past and simply affirm the richness of life — once we wake up to it and decide to live it. If I ever fully wake up, I probably shan’t want to write at all.”

A reputation as a “working-class writer”, as one critic pointed out, was a distraction from Callow’s primary virtues of honesty, lucidity, patience and clear-sighted analysis of the self. Because of the passion and intensity of his style he was often compared to D. H. Lawrence, whom Callow considered “without doubt the greatest writer of our time”, and about whom he wrote three biographical volumes.

Philip Kenneth Callow was born in Birmingham in 1924, the son of a clerk. His mother came from Coventry, and it was there that he grew up, educated at Coventry Technical College and leaving school at 15 to be apprenticed as a toolmaker. Air raids drove him out to Leamington Spa, where he spent the war. He was later to write about his crowded home life — lower-middle class or something like it — the vicious behaviour of school teachers and the physical hardships of wartime and postwar life.

Callow lived for a time in Nottingham, and then went to work for the electricity board in Plymouth. He lived with his wife, Christian, and daughter in a cottage in Millbrook, Cornwall (he later settled in Plymouth itself), and wrote in his spare time. His first novel, The Hosanna Man, a highly autobiographical account of a young artist trying to establish himself, was published in 1956. While The Times found the story derivative and isolated from ordinary life, The Daily Telegraph praised its originality and air of authenticity, and hailed Callow as a “genuine primitive talent”. Unfortunately for him, a Nottingham bookseller claimed to recognise himself in the book, and when he threatened legal action the publisher destroyed every copy not yet sold. Nevertheless, the book won several awards, and Callow was given one of the first Arts Council grants for writers, which enabled him to start writing full-time.

Simplicity in the sense of ordinariness was central to all the novels (more than a dozen) that followed — the trilogy consisted of Going to the Moon (1968), The Bliss Body (1969) and Flesh of the Morning (1971) — and adventures were of the mind and the emotions. Indeed, Callow said that he was what was called an “inside man” (as opposed to an outside one): “Everything that’s important is going on inside — that’s why I’m not interested in reform or political movements. I think revolutionary things start in people’s heads; you can’t start them from outside.” He had a buried wisdom that could make much out of little, a metaphorical vision that allowed him to see beyond the immediate and the transient. One critic observed that Callow at times recalled “a latter-day Gissing discovering grimy pockets of poverty lurking in the welfare state”, and commented that he was at his best in his “objective sketches of old men in public libraries or nodding on grimy park seats”.

In the late 1960s Callow did a teacher training course at St Luke’s College, Exeter, and he held Arts Council Fellowships at Maria Gray College, Twickenham, Bullmarsh College, Reading, and Falmouth School of Art. A Somerset Maugham award in 1973 allowed him to travel, and a few years later he began to tutor on Arvon writing courses in Devon and Yorkshire.

Callow published his first biography, of Lawrence the young man, in 1975, and volumes on Lawrence’s “nomadic” years and on the last decade of his life came later. He also wrote biographies of Robert Louis Stevenson, Van Gogh, Cézanne and Walt Whitman — that last was his favourite “because he was so utterly unlike me, and because I’m indebted to him as a poet”. Imbued with all Callow’s intense nervous energy, his openness to joy and hurt, his biographies were deeply responsive to the spirit of his subjects.

Callow was an Arts Council writer-in-residence at Sheffield Polytechnic from 1980 to 1986. In old age he concentrated on poetry, helped by a Royal Literary Fund pension. Like many writers of his generation, in his last years he was handicapped by the trend for publishing to focus on the young. Thanks to small publishers, however, his work continued to appear in the US and Britain — his recent books included Passage from Home: A Memoir (2002) and The Magnolia (2004), a novel — though he did not receive the widespread recognition which many readers thought he deserved.

As a young man Callow was painfully shy, and overcoming that was, by his own account, a driving force in his writing. He was also charming, much liked by pupils and colleagues, modest and of rocklike integrity. An amateur painter all his life, he drew the covers for at least one of his books of poetry.

Callow was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Callow’s first marriage was dissolved in 1970. In 1987 he married Anne Golby, who survives him, as does his daughter.

Philip Callow, writer, was born on October 26, 1924. He died on September 22, 2007, aged 82