J.B. Priestley was already a successful novelist when he turned to drama in 1931. With thirty-two plays produced by 1950, he dominated the West End as the most visible transitional figure between George Bernard Shaw and the "angry young men" of the 1950s. Further, he experimented with conceptual and dramatic time in the late 1930s. By the late 1940s he had firmly established himself as the craftsman who, while writing volumes of prose fiction and nonfiction, could provide clever dramatic examples of naturalism and sentimental comedy. Although Priestley's time plays look to drama's future in Great Britain, he focused mostly on middle-class audiences by varying the traditional forms they would enjoy.

The son of a schoolmaster and the grandson of a mill worker, John Boynton Priestley is a Yorkshireman raised and educated in Bradford, a West Riding industrial community. When he reached sixteen, he began to have essays published...