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Famous Like Me > Composer > H > James F. Hanley

Profile of James F. Hanley on Famous Like Me

 
Name: James F. Hanley  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 17th February 1892
   
Place of Birth: Rensselaer, Indiana, USA
   
Profession: Composer
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

James Hanley (September 3, 1901 - November 11, 1985) was a British novelist.

Born in Liverpool to a working class family, Hanley left school early and took to sea at the age of 13. This was a formative influence and the sea influenced his writing as much as it influenced Joseph Conrad. When he returned to Britain he moved to London in 1924 and began working in a number of jobs before settling as a journalist, writing bleak, spare novels based on his experiences in the meantime.

His second novel, Boy, was praised by William Faulkner amongst others, but was suppressed for 'obscenity' (this led to a famous court case which Hanley lost; the novel was not republished until 1990). Partly as a result of this, Hanley moved to Wales, where he began The Furys, a sequence of novels about working-class life in the twentieth century. This was highly praised by John Cowper Powys, with whom Hanley had become friends (Hanley later wrote a monograph on Powys' work).

During the war, Hanley moved back to London to experience the worst of the blitz: this led to his novel No Directions (which was published with an introduction by Henry Miller). He moved back to Wales and finished The Furys in 1956. In the 1960s he concentrated on writing critically acclaimed plays for TV and radio. However he returned to the novel form in the 1970s, writing works including A Woman in the Sky and The Kingdom, which some of his admirers see as being amongst his best. Due to his bleak subject matter and occasional use of experimental techniques, Hanley never had much commercial success, but he has always had critical acclaim.

Selected works

  • A Dream Journey (1976) Horizon Press. ISBN 0818006234
  • The Furys (1993) Penguin. ISBN 0140185070
  • Boy (1992) Penguin. ISBN 0140184902
  • The Ocean (1999) Harvill Press. ISBN 1860466753

Critical study

Fordham, J. (2004) James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class. University of Wales Press. ISBN 0708317553

External link

The Official James Hanley Website.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article James F. Hanley