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John Priestley(; 13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984) later John Boynton Priestley was an English novelist, playwright, screenwriter, broadcaster and social commentator.
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John Priestley(; 13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984) later John Boynton Priestley was an English novelist, playwright, screenwriter, broadcaster and social commentator. His Yorkshire background is reflected in much of his fiction, notably in The Good Companions (1929), which first brought him to wide public notice.
John Priestley(; 13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984) later John Boynton Priestley was an English novelist, playwright, screenwriter, broadcaster and social commentator.
His Yorkshire background is reflected in much of his fiction, notably in The Good Companions (1929), which first brought him to wide public notice. Many of his plays are structured around a time slip, and he went on to develop a new theory of time, with different dimensions that link past, present and future.
In 1940, he broadcast a series of short propaganda radio talks, which were credited with strengthening civilian morale during the Battle of Britain. In the following years his left-wing beliefs brought him into conflict with the government and influenced the development of the welfare state. He wrote a number of plays during this period, including An Inspector Calls (1945).
Priestley was born on 13 September 1894 at 34 Mannheim Road, Manningham, which he described as an "extremely respectable" suburb of Bradford. His father, Jonathan Priestley (1868–1924), was a headmaster. His mother, Emma (née Holt; 1865–1896), was a mill girl. She died when Priestley was just two years old and his father remarried four years later. Priestley was educated at Belle Vue Grammar School, which he left at 16 to work as a junior clerk at Helm & Co. in the Swan Arcade.
During his years at Helm & Co. (1910–1914) he started writing at night and had articles published in local and London newspapers. He was to draw on memories of Bradford in many of the works he wrote after he had moved south, including his novel Bright Day and play When We Are Married. As an old man he deplored the destruction by developers of Victorian buildings in Bradford such as the Swan Arcade, where he had his first job.
Priestley served in the British Army during the First World War, volunteering for the Duke of Wellington's Regiment in September 1914 and being posted to the 10th Battalion in France as a Lance-Corporal on 26 August 1915.
He was badly wounded in June 1916 when he was buried alive by a trench mortar. He spent many months in military hospitals and convalescent establishments. On 26 January 1918 he was commissioned as an officer in the Devonshire Regiment and posted back to France in the late summer. As he describes in his literary reminiscences, Margin Released, he suffered from the effects of poison gas and then supervised German prisoners of war before being demobilised in early 1919.
After his military service Priestley received a university education at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was among the first cohort of students to study the newly-founded English Tripos; transferring to History for Part II, he was awarded an upper-second class degree in 1921. By the age of 30 he had established a reputation as an essayist and critic. His novel Benighted (1927) was adapted into the James Whale film The Old Dark House (1932); the novel was published under the film's name in the United States.
Priestley's first major success came with a novel, The Good Companions (1929), which earned him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and made him a national figure. His next novel, Angel Pavement (1930), further established him as a successful novelist. However some critics were less than complimentary about his work and Priestley threatened legal action against Graham Greene for what he took to be a defamatory portrait of him in the novel Stamboul Train (1932).
In 1934, he published the travelogue English Journey, an account of what he saw and heard while travelling through the country in the depths of the Great Depression.
Priestley has been considered prejudiced against the Irish, as shown in English Journey: "A great many speeches have been made and books written on the subject of what England has done to Ireland... I should be interested to hear a speech and read a book or two on the subject of what Ireland has done to England... if we do have an Irish Republic as our neighbour, and it is found possible to return her exiled citizens, what a grand clearance there will be in all the western ports, from the Clyde to Cardiff, what a fine exit of ignorance and dirt and drunkenness and disease."
He moved into a new genre and became equally well known as a dramatist. Dangerous Corner (1932) was the first of many plays that would enthral West End theatre audiences. His best-known play is An Inspector Calls (1945). His plays are more varied in tone than the novels, several being influenced by J. W. Dunne's theory of time, which plays a part in the plots of Dangerous Corner (1932) and Time and the Conways.
In 1940, Priestley wrote an essay for Horizon magazine in which he criticised George Bernard Shaw for his support of Stalin: "Shaw presumes that his friend Stalin has everything under control. Well, Stalin may have made special arrangements to see that Shaw comes to no harm, but the rest of us in Western Europe do not feel quite so sure of our fate, especially those of us who do not share Shaw's curious admiration for dictators."
During the Second World War he was a regular broadcaster on the BBC. The Postscript, broadcast on Sunday night in 1940 and again in 1941, drew peak audiences of 16 million; only Churchill was more popular with listeners. Graham Greene wrote that Priestley "became in the months after Dunkirk a leader second only in importance to Mr Churchill. And he gave us what our other leaders have always failed to give us—an ideology." But his talks were cancelled. It was thought that this was the effect of complaints from Churchill that they were too left-wing; however in 2015 Priestley's son said in a talk on the latest book being published about his father's life that it was in fact Churchill's Cabinet that brought about the cancellation by supplying negative reports on the broadcasts to Churchill.
Source: J. B. Priestley (CC BY-SA)
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Priestley chaired the 1941 Committee and in 1942 he was a cofounder of the socialist Common Wealth Party. The political content of his broadcasts and hi
