John Boynton Priestley
born ,
Sept. 13, 1894, Bradford, Yorkshire, Eng.
died Aug. 14, 1984, Alveston, near
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire
British novelist,
playwright, and essayist, noted for his
varied output and his ability for shrewd
characterization.
Priestley served in
the infantry in World War I (1914–19) and
then studied English literature at Trinity
College, Cambridge (B.A., 1922). He
thereafter worked as a journalist and first
established a reputation with the essays
collected in The English Comic Characters
(1925) and The English Novel (1927). He
achieved enormous popular success with The
Good Companions (1929), a picaresque novel
about a group of traveling performers. This
was followed in 1930 by his most solidly
crafted novel, Angel Pavement, a sombre,
realistic depiction of the lives of a group
of office workers in London. Among his other
more important novels are Bright Day (1946)
and Lost Empires (1965).
Priestley was also
a prolific dramatist, and he achieved early
successes on the stage with such robust,
good-humoured comedies as Laburnum Grove
(1933) and When We Are Married (1938).
Influenced by the time theories of John
William Dunne, he experimented with
expressionistic psychological drama—e.g.,
Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here
Before (both 1937) and Johnson over Jordan
(1939). He also used time distortion as the
basis for a mystery drama with moral
overtones, An Inspector Calls (1946). Many
of his plays featured skillful
characterizations of ordinary people in
domestic settings.
An adept radio
speaker, he had a wide audience for his
patriotic broadcasts during World War II and
for his subsequent Sunday evening programs.
Priestley’s large literary output of more
than 120 books was complemented by his
status as a commentator and literary
spokesman for his countrymen, a role he
sustained through his forceful and engaging
public personality. Priestley refused both a
knighthood and a peerage, but he accepted
the Order of Merit in 1977.
A revival of
interest in and a reappraisal of Priestley’s
work occurred in the 1970s. During that
decade he produced, among other works,
Found, Lost, Found, or The English Way of
Life (1976).
