Thomas Nashe was born in Lowestoft in 1561, and educated at St John's College, Cambridge. After graduating in 1586, he became one of the "University Wits", a circle of writers who came to London and wrote for the stage and the press. In 1589 his preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon was published. It attacked contemporary writers who plagiarized from classical authors, and praised Spenser and Greene. The Anatomie of Absurditie, also published in 1589, was a satire of contemporary literature, especially of romances.
Nashe took part in the Martin Marprelate controversy, answering attacks made on the Church of England by a Puritan group of writers known as Martin Marprelate. Using the pen name 'Pasquil', Nashe may have written several satiric pamphlets, of which An Almond for a Parrat (1590) is the only one attributed to him with conviction. Nashe also took part in a violent literary controversy with the poet Gabriel Harvey and his brother Richard. Richard Harvey had been extremely critical of Nashe's preface to Greene's Menaphon, and Nashe retaliated in Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil (1592). The work, a prose satire, was in part an attack on the Harveys, as well as on Nashe's opponents in the Marprelate controversy; it also protests against the public's neglect of worthy writers. Gabriel Harvey wrote an unpleasant account of Greene's final days in his Four Letters the same year, and Nashe responded by writing Four Letters Confuted to defend his dead friend's memory. The latter was published in 1593, and is also known as Strange News of the Intercepting of Certain Letters. Nashe may have tried to make peace in Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593), a prose work warning Londoners that unless they reformed, London would suffer the fate of Jerusalem. Gabriel Harvey further attacked Nashe's Pierce Penniless in Pierce's Supererogation (1593), which Nashe countered with Have with You to Saffron Walden (1596). This "war" was finally ended in June 1599, when Archbishop Whitgift and Bishop Bancroft decreed that "all Nasshes bookes and Doctor Harveyes bookes be taken wheresoever they maye be found and that none of theire bookes bee ever printed hereafter."1
Nashe's best-known work, the novel The Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton (1594) is now thought to have been the first picaresque novel in English. It is a loosely connected account of adventures real and fictional on the Continent. Important among Nashe's other writings are Summers Last Will and Testament (1600), a masque; The Terrors of the Night, an attack on demonology; and Lenten Stuff (1599).
