J.B. Priestley.

At 34 Mannheim Road, Bradford, John Boynton Priestley was born in 1894 to a schoolmaster father and a mother who died when he was an infant. He attended Belle Vue Grammar School but left at 16 to work as a junior clerk at Helm & Co., a wool firm in Swan Arcade. During these years he wrote at night and published articles in local papers. He served in World War I with the Duke of Wellington and Devon regiments, surviving serious injury.

Priestley’s first book, The Chapman of Rhymes, was a poetry volume published in 1918 while he was in the army. After earning his degree from Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1921, he worked as a journalist in London, contributing essays to the New Statesman. His first professionally published collection, Brief Diversions, appeared in 1922. He turned to novels in the late 1920s, producing multiple books per year. His fascination with time led to plays like A Dangerous Corner 1932, Time and the Conways 1937, and Johnson Over Jordan 1939. He founded English Plays Ltd. to produce his own works. He also wrote the libretto for the opera The Olympians. During WWII, his radio broadcasts made him the voice of the common people.

Priestley married three times. His first marriage was to Emily Tempest in 1919; she died in 1925. He then married Mary Jane Wyndham Lewis in 1926, the former wife of biographer D.B. Wyndham Lewis. In 1953 he married archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, with whom he lived in Kissing Tree House near Stratford-upon-Avon until his death in 1984. He had a daughter Sylvia and a son Tom Priestley, who worked as a film and sound editor.

J.B. Priestley’s legacy endures through his prolific output of over 120 books and his plays. His play An Inspector Calls is frequently revived, winning the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Revival in 1993. He is remembered for his essays that spoke to the common person, his advocacy for nuclear disarmament, and his theories on time. He refused knighthood but accepted the Order of Merit in 1977. The J.B. Priestley Library at the University of Bradford honors his connection to his hometown.