Who Was J.B. Priestley?
J.B. Priestley (1894), the son of a schoolmaster, was born in Bradford in 1894. He was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and has made literature his career. He is a novelist, critic, dramatist, and essayist, and during the Second World War became well known as a broadcaster.
Priestley’s fame as a novelist was established by the popular The Good Companions (1929), a long story of the adventures of a touring concert party. It shows all the friendly ease and ordinariness of Priestley at his best. It is, indeed, as a portrayer of the everyday life of the everyday character that Priestley excels. His figures are clearly, if rather shallowly, drawn, and his style has an appealing ease and naturalness, though nothing of distinction. Indeed, it is questionable whether Priestley ranks more highly than a rather better ‘popular’ novelist. Among his other novels are Angel Pavement (1930), and Bright Day (1946). He is a talented essayist, as is shown by his work in Brief Diversions (1922), The Balconinny (1929), and Self-Selected Essays (1932), while his literary criticism is to be found in George Meredith (1926), The English Comic Characters (1926), Thomas Love Peacock (1927), The English Novel (1927), and English Humour (1928).
Priestley has written more than thirty plays since he began with Dangerous Corner (1932). He has a wide range-comedy, farce, domestic drama, a morality play Johnson over Jordan, (1939), some serious, thoughtful studies-and he has achieved great popularity in the theatre. Until Johnson over Jordan he was content to work in the conventional dramatic forms, in which he showed considerable skill, but his interest in deeper subjects (first seen in Time and the Conways (1937) and I Have Been Here Before (1937) led to his later experiments. In 1939 he produced the interesting, though commercially unsuccessful, Johnson over Jordan, a modern morality play, in which he uses many of the tricks of expressionism.
Priestly the ardent reformer, and Priestley the commonsensical, plain man, both appear in his dramas. His typically Yorkshire humour is part of the almost aggressive ‘bonhommie’ of much of his work. His characters are soundly drawn, the dialogue is pungent, and his plays are always good theatre. His chief lack is of poetic insight, which alone can make the greatest drama out of the metaphysical problems that engaged his mind in his experimental work. Among his best-known plays are Loburnum Grove (1933), Eden End (1934), I Have Been Here Before (1937), When We Are Married (1938), The Long Mirror (1940), They came to a City (1943), Desert Highway (1943), The Linden Tree (1947), and Home is Tomorrow (1948).
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