Product details
- ISBN 9781784878764
- Weight: 153g
- Dimensions: 130 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 06 Mar 2025
- Publisher: Vintage Publishing
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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'Witty and unusual' George Orwell
'Magnificent' W H Auden
A lyrical tour of life as a young working-class man born into the first days of the 20th century, Caliban Shrieks is a lost masterpiece of 1930s British literature.
Caliban Shrieks’ narrator went from a childhood of poverty, yet joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war. He was turned out of the army a vagrant - seeing England from city to city, county to county - before being thrust back into an uncertain cycle of working life as it unfolded in the post-war years.
A story of men and women lost, wandering – and angrily dreaming of a better, fairer England, Hilton’s autobiographical novel is a bold modernist retelling of the myth of how we find ourselves disenfranchised from the world and sold into a slavery of our making.
Jack Hilton was born in the opening days of 1900 in Oldham, Lancashire. He served in the army during the First World War and, after a period of homelessness and working odd jobs, became an active member of Rochdale’s Worker’s Rights movement, where his rallying speeches led to a court-order banning him from further speechwriting. Instead, Hilton turned to prose writing as an outlet, using stints on the dole to hone his immense literary gift and produce his autobiographical novel, Caliban Shrieks.
A chance encounter with an editor in 1934 led to Hilton’s discovery and paved the way for a short, but dramatic, writing career that included the publication of five books – including Caliban Shrieks – and greatly influenced the course of political writing in British literature.
