J. B. Priestley

About J. B. Priestley

John Boynton Priestley (1894-1984) was born into a lower middle-class family in Bradford, England at the close of the nineteenth century. He left grammar school in his mid-teens, and went into the wool trade as a clerk. It was here that he began a writing career which was to span almost a century; one in which much of the vast social and cultural change was reflected in the work he produced.

Priestley returned from service in the First World War to a place at Cambridge University, and went on to establish himself as a writer, critic and with The Good Companions in 1929, a nationally recognised novelist.

From here he moved into the theatre, often using the dramatic medium to explore various theories of time, in works such as Dangerous Corner, Time and the Conways, I Have Been Here Before and Johnson Over Jordan. The public took Priestley to its heart, and come the Second World War, he was drawing vast audiences with a series of evening broadcasts on BBC radio, later collected and published as Britain Speaks.

These programs came to an end amid complaints that Priestley was using the slot as a forum for his strong socialist views. Although these objections came mostly from conservatives, they addressed a political bent that would become increasingly present in both his life and work.

Whilst chairing the 1941 committee and placing himself at the forefront of the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958, Priestley remained an active and influential writer in and beyond the theatre. Collaborations with Iris Murdoch (A Severed Head, 1963) and his third wife Jacquetta Hawkes (Dragon's Mouth, 1952) bookended the debuts of seven other plays, not to mention the publication of Literature and Western Man and The Magicians.

J. B. Priestley's plays continue to be performed all over Europe and America and his dramatic output spans more than forty years in which his experimentation with form and content, marked him out as one of the key contributors to the development of modern British drama. Audiences today are most familiar with his work through Stephen Daldry’s National Theatre re-visioning of An Inspector Calls in the early 1990s, a production which is still on tour in Britain and on the continent. The production, with its Edwardian doll's house built on the rubble of the Blitz, showed contemporary audiences that J.B. Priestley is a playwright whose style and politics have sustained their cultural currency into the new millennium.