James Hanley
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James (Joseph) Hanley (September 3, 1897 - November 11, 1985) was a British novelist and playwright of Irish descent.
Born in Kirkdale, Liverpool, in 1897 (not Dublin, nor 1901 as he generally implied) to a working class family, Hanley left school in 1910 or 1911 and worked as a clerk, before going to sea in 1915 at the age of 17 (not 13 as he again implied). His father Edward and various relatives had also gone to sea and James grew up close to the docks. Life at sea was a formative influence and much of his early writing is about seamen. Then in April 1917 Hanley jumped ship in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, and shortly thereafter joined the Canadian Army. Hanley fought in France in the summer of 1918. He returned to Liverpool in 1919, and may have taken one final voyage before working as a railway porter in Bootle. It is also probable that he later worked at a number of other jobs, while writing fiction in his spare time. However, it was not until 1929 that a novel "Drift" was accepted and this was published in March 1930. Hanley’s second novel,"Boy" (1931), was praised by William Faulkner amongst others, but was later, in 1934, suppressed for obscenity. This led to a famous court case which Hanley’s publisher lost. Hanley moved to Wales in 1931, where he met his wife to be and began "The Furys" (1935), the first in a sequence of loosely autobiographical novels about working-class life in Liverpool. This was highly praised by the writer John Cowper Powys, with whom Hanley had become friends. In July 1939, Hanley moved to London to write documentaries and plays for the BBC. His direct experience of the blitz is seen in his novel "No Directions" (published with an introduction by Henry Miller in 1943). He moved back to Wales in December 1940, where he remained until 1963, when he moved to North London, close to his son Liam. In the 1950s he wrote two of his finest novels "Closed Harbour" (1952) and "Levine" (1956), but in the 1960s Hanley turned to writing plays for radio, television and occasionally the theatre. However he returned to the novel form in the 1970s, writing "A Woman in the Sky" (1973) and "The Kingdom" (1978), which some see as being amongst his best works. James Hanley never had much commercial success, possibly due to his bleak subject matter, but he has always had critical acclaim, both in Britain and the USA. He was buried in Wales in 1985.
[edit] Selected works
- "Boy" (1931). First unexpurgated edition (ed. André Deutsch), 1990. Reprinted Penguin Books (1992), ISBN 0-14-018490-2. Reprinted Oneworld Classics (2007), ISBN 978-1-84749-006-3
- "The Furys" (1935) Reprinted Penguin 1993. ISBN 0-14-018507-0
- "The Ocean" (1941) Reprinted Harvill Press 1999. ISBN 1-86046-675-3 Levine (1956)
- A Kingdom (1978)
[edit] Critical study
- Fordham, John. James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class. University of Wales Press (2004). ISBN 0-7083-1755-3
- Gostick, Chris. "Extra Material on James Hanley's Boy". In the Oneworld Classics edition of "Boy" (2007). ISBN 978-1-84749-006-3
