Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke, an English writer best remembered for the novels Party Going, Living and Loving. He published a total of nine novels between 1926 and 1952.
Margaret Forster was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian and critic, best known for the 1965 novel Georgy Girl, made into a successful film of the same name, which inspired a hit song by The Seekers. Other successes were a 2003 novel, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, biographies of Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and her memoirs Hidden Lives and Precious Lives.
Hard Times: For These Times is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book surveys English society and satirises the social and economic conditions of the era.
Wise Blood is the first novel by American author Flannery O'Connor, published in 1952. The novel was assembled from disparate stories first published in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review and Partisan Review. The first chapter is an expanded version of her Master's thesis, "The Train", and other chapters are reworked versions of "The Peeler," "The Heart of the Park" and "Enoch and the Gorilla". The novel concerns a returning World War II veteran who, haunted by a life-long crisis of faith, resolves to form an anti-religious ministry in an eccentric, fictionalized Southern city after finding his family homestead abandoned without a trace.
Mrs McGinty's Dead is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in February 1952 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 3 March the same year. The US edition retailed at $2.50 and the UK edition at nine shillings and sixpence (9/6). The Detective Book Club issued an edition, also in 1952, as Blood Will Tell.
Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, working-class writer, feminist, and socialist activist from Lancashire. Poet, journalist, children's writer and author, Carnie Holdsworth was the first working-class woman in Britain to publish a novel and is a rare example of a female working-class novelist. She published at least ten novels during her lifetime.
Proletarian literature refers here to the literature created by left-wing writers mainly for the class-conscious proletariat. Though the Encyclopædia Britannica states that because it "is essentially an intended device of revolution", it is therefore often published by the Communist Party or left wing sympathizers, the proletarian novel has also been categorized without any emphasis on revolution, as a novel "about the working classes and working-class life; perhaps with the intention of making propaganda". This different emphasis may reflect a difference between Russian, American and other traditions of working-class writing, with that of Britain. The British tradition was not especially inspired by the Communist Party, but had its roots in the Chartist movement, and socialism, amongst others. Furthermore, writing about the British working-class writers, H Gustav Klaus, in The Socialist Novel: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (1982) suggested that "the once current [term] 'proletarian' is, internationally, on the retreat, while the competing concepts of 'working-class' and 'socialist' continue to command about equal adherence".
"The Garden Party" is a 1922 short story by Katherine Mansfield. It was first published in three parts in the Saturday Westminster Gazette on 4 and 11 February 1922, and the Weekly Westminster Gazette on 18 February 1922. It later appeared in The Garden Party and Other Stories. Its luxurious setting is based on Mansfield's childhood home at 133 Tinakori Road, the second of three houses in Thorndon, Wellington that her family lived in.
Kate Dayus was an English writer from the West Midlands.
Mary Reid Anderson was a Scottish suffragist and was a leading trades unionist. She was the general secretary of the Women's Trade Union League and was involved in the formation of the National Federation of Women Workers and National Anti-Sweating League.
This Is My Street is a 1963 British black and white kitchen sink drama film directed by Sidney Hayers and starring Ian Hendry, June Ritchie, Avice Landone, John Hurt and Meredith Edwards. The screenplay is by Bill MacIlwraith from a novel by Nan Maynard. It concerns a bored housewife living in a run-down inner city London house who begins an affair with her mother's lodger, who lives next door.
A World to Win is a novel written by Jack Conroy and published in 1935. It was republished in 2000. This novel, which is set before and during the Great Depression, follows two brothers through their lives both together and separately. One brother, Leo, represents the life of a working man, while the other, Robert, shows the life of a writer, a struggle that Conroy himself dealt with. Despite Robert being determined to be the brother who becomes famous for his writing, he does not. In fact Leo, who never seemed to have a plan, becomes "famous" first when he becomes a wanted man. Although the brothers have led very different lives, they end up together in the end when Robert decides to do something unplanned and free his brother from the police.
Prostitute is a 1980 British drama film, the directorial debut of Tony Garnett who also wrote and produced the film.
Thumbs Up is a 1943 American musical drama film producted by Albert J. Cohen for Republic Pictures and directed by Joseph Santley. The film stars Brenda Joyce, Richard Fraser and Elsa Lanchester. The screenplay was written by Frank Gill Jr. based on a story idea by Ray Golden and Henry K. Moritz. Musical direction was by Walter Scharf, words and music by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne respectively. The film was released on July 5, 1943.
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican author living in the United States. She is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks and the novel Faces in the Crowd, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Luiselli's 2015 novel The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Fiction, and she was awarded the Premio Metropolis Azul in Montreal, Quebec. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, with her work appearing in publications including, The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker. Her book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli's 2020 novel, Lost Children Archive won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Mandy Theresa O'Loughlin, known professionally as Kit de Waal, is a British/Irish writer. Her debut novel, My Name Is Leon, was published by Penguin Books in June 2016. After securing the publishing deal with Penguin, De Waal used some of her advance to set up the Kit de Waal Creative Writing Scholarship to help improve working-class representation in the arts. The audiobook version of My Name is Leon is voiced by Sir Lenny Henry. De Waal has also published short stories, including the collection Supporting Cast (2020). She is Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.
Millicent (Millie) Jane Taplin (1902–1980) was a British designer and painter of ceramics who spent most of her career at Josiah Wedgwood and Sons (1917–1962). She was trained in painting by Alfred and Louise Powell, and supervised Wedgwood's ceramics painters. She became a designer of decorative patterns in 1929 and by the mid-to-late 1930s was one of the company's main designers, although she did not design pottery shapes. She was one of only two working-class women to become a successful ceramics designer before the Second World War. Her tableware designs were exhibited by Wedgwood at Grafton Galleries in London in 1936, and several of her designs are now on display at the V&A Museum. Her design "Strawberry Hill", with Victor Skellern, was awarded the Council of Industrial Design's Design of the Year Award in 1957.
Jessie Eden was a British trade union leader and communist activist, most famous for leading between 40,000 and 50,000 households during the Birmingham rent-strike of 1939. She was also involved in the construction of the Soviet Union's Moscow Metro, convincing women at Birmingham's Joseph Lucas motor factory to join the 1926 UK General Strike, and leading an unprecedented and successful strike of 10,000 factory worker women in 1931. For her commitment to helping improve the working conditions of English factory workers, she was awarded the T&G gold medal from Ernest Bevin. Later in life, she served for three decades as Birmingham city's federation of council house tenants. Her involvement in the trade unions of the English Midlands led to a massive increase in women joining British trade unions. She was a lifelong supporter of both the Transport and General Workers' Union (T&G), and of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) of which she was a leading member.
The Factory is a proletarian novella written by Japanese author Hiroko Oyamada. Originally written and published in Japan in 2013 by Shinchosha Publishing Co., the book was translated into English by David Boyd and published in 2019 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. The uniquely structured novella switches between the perspectives of three characters as they begin jobs at a joint living and working facility known as "the factory."
Bobbin Up was the first novel by the author Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002). It is set in 1957 in a spinning mill in Alexandria, an industrial suburb of inner Sydney, and describes the lives of fifteen working-class women who work there for breadline wages. The novel is a series of loosely connected vignettes, where the life of each woman and her family is described within one or two chapters. The book concludes with a stay-in strike by the women for reinstatement after a mass layoff. Most of the group appear together in the final chapter.
