J. B. Priestley's writing career spanned more than seventy years and covered many genres. After war service and Cambridge he became a prolific literary journalist, throughout the 1920s collecting his essays in more or less annual volumes; established himself after two years of more modest novelistic successes with the runaway best-seller The Good Companions in 1929; and began a long theatrical career, which included producing as well as writing, with a dramatization of the same novel in 1931. He subsequently wrote some thirty novels, nearly fifty plays, and several screenplays. In wartime his broadcasts helped to strengthen resolve both in England and America, and his concerns became more overtly social and socialist. While the popularity of his dramas and fiction was declining somewhat in the 1950s and after, he turned to writing for more serious journals of social concern and diversified still further into travel writing, social history, and loosely...