This book provides an academic study of J. B. Priestley—novelist, playwright, screen-writer, journalist and broadcaster, political activist, public intellectual and popular entertainer, one of the makers of twentieth-century Britain, and one of its sharpest critics. From his scathing analysis of a slump-stricken nation in the best-selling English Journey, to his popular wartime broadcasts that paved the way to 1945 and the welfare state, his post-war critique of ‘Admass’ and the Cold War (he was a co-founder of CND), and his continual engagement with the question of ‘Englishness’, Priestley ad ... More

This book provides an academic study of J. B. Priestley—novelist, playwright, screen-writer, journalist and broadcaster, political activist, public intellectual and popular entertainer, one of the makers of twentieth-century Britain, and one of its sharpest critics. From his scathing analysis of a slump-stricken nation in the best-selling English Journey, to his popular wartime broadcasts that paved the way to 1945 and the welfare state, his post-war critique of ‘Admass’ and the Cold War (he was a co-founder of CND), and his continual engagement with the question of ‘Englishness’, Priestley addressed the key issues of the century from a radical standpoint in fiction, journalism and plays which appealed to a wide audience and made him one of the most successful writers of his day, in a career that spanned the 1920s to the 1980s. The book explores the cultural, literary and political history of twentieth-century Britain through the themes that preoccupied Priestley throughout his life: competing versions of Englishness; tradition, modernity and the decline of industrial England; ‘Americanisation’, mass culture and ‘Admass’; cultural values and ‘broadbrow’ culture; consumerism and the decay of the public sphere; and the loss of spirituality and community in ‘the nervous excitement, the frenzy, the underlying despair of our century’. It argues that Priestley has been unjustly neglected for too long: we have a great deal to learn both from this multi-faceted man, and from the English radical tradition he represented.