J. B. Priestley (1894-1984), English dramatist, essayist, novelist, journalist, critic, and broadcaster, best known for his provocative plays, popular novels, and wartime radio broadcasts.

A versatile writer, Priestley embraced a range of expressive forms in which he chronicled and commented on 20th-century Britain and modern British identity. Characterized perhaps paradoxically as both a realist and an idealist, Priestley explored the human experience and placed the theme of collective responsibility at the centre of his work. Priestley’s strong social conscience inspired his activism beyond literary pursuits but it did not override his reluctance to be affiliated with political parties or movements. He stood (unsuccessfully) as an independent candidate for Parliament in 1945; he participated in the establishment of UNESCO in 1947, and he was instrumental in the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In keeping with his radical, independent outlook, he refused a knighthood and peerage, accepting in 1977 the Order of Merit instead.

Priestley, whose strongest affiliation was perhaps with his birthplace, the city of Bradford in Yorkshire, and the surrounding Yorkshire Dales, was born on September 13, 1894. Although academically inclined, he was keen to learn outside the classroom and left Bradford Grammar School in 1910 to work for a wool firm. At the age of 18 he began writing a regular column (“Round the Hearth”) for the Bradford Pioneer, reflecting on local and national events.

In September 1914, at the outset of World War I, Priestley enlisted in the army and served in the infantry in France. Unlike contemporaries such as Robert Graves (in Good-Bye to All That, 1929), he did not formally write about his experiences of trench warfare until much later. In the autobiographical Margin Released (1962) he wrote: “I felt as indeed I still feel today and must go on feeling until I die, the open wound, never to be healed, of my generation's fate, the best sorted out and then slaughtered, not by hard necessity but by huge, murderous public folly.”

At the end of the war and supported by a grant, Priestley studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Although he graduated in 1921 with a degree in history and politics, and married his girlfriend Pat Tempest, Priestley never felt settled in Cambridge. The couple moved to London in 1922, and they had two daughters. Priestley established himself as a professional writer, taking on freelance work for publications such as The Bookman and The Spectator, and the publishing firm The Bodley Head.

A period of prolific output from the late 1920s through to the mid-1930s was, in part, fuelled by personal despair: in 1924 Priestley’s wife was diagnosed with cancer, and in the same year his father died. Priestley also embarked on an affair with Jane Mary Wyndham Lewis, wife of the journalist Bevan Wyndham Lewis; and the couple later married, in 1926, after the death of Priestley’s first wife. They had three children together, and their marriage lasted nearly 30 years before they divorced. Priestley’s third wife was Jacquetta Hawkes (1910-1996), with whom he wrote Journey down a Rainbow (1955), an account of travel in the south-western United States.

From 1927 to 1929, collections of essays, biographies, literary criticism, and first attempts at fiction appeared. These paved the way to Priestley’s first commercial success, The Good Companions (1929). A picaresque novel about disenchantment and a travelling theatre company, it won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Priestley followed this with the critically acclaimed novel Angel Pavement (1930), a sombre and realistic depiction of the lives of a group of office workers in London.

Although Priestley has been considered part of a British realist tradition of fiction writing (to which Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, among others, belonged), his plays and nonfiction often displayed an idealism (similar to Wells’s) that cast him as prophet and sage as well as “common man”. The highly influential English Journey (1934) is a bittersweet 1930s travelogue, and his popular wartime radio broadcasts in 1940 (published in Britain Speaks, 1940, and All England Listened, 1968) criticized the political establishment and urged the public to remember the social and economic consequences of World War I. Priestley’s “Time” plays experiment with the interconnectedness of past, present, and future in order to explore the possibility of happiness and free will in a conflicted world. One of his best-known plays, the detective thriller An Inspector Calls (which had its London premiere in 1946), exposed the hypocrisies of bourgeois society and the disintegration of social values. A successful 1990s revival of the play at the National Theatre emphasized Priestley’s enduring appeal and significance as a literary artist and social commentator. He died in Stratford-upon-Avon on August 14, 1984.