Caliban Shrieks

Jack Hilton

$47.95

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Vintage Classics
06 March 2025

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945); Fiction: special features; Social & cultural history; Social classes; Sociology: work & labour

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.

WITH NEW INTRODUCTIONS BY ANDREW McMILLAN AND JACK CHADWICK

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 debut is a bold invitation to enter a whirlwind existence rarely seen in the literature of its era.

Lost to time, only to be rediscovered again in 2022, Caliban Shrieks is a working-class masterpiece of British literature, and continues to speak as brash and impassioned as it did on its first rave publication in 1935.

'Witty and unusual' George Orwell

'Magnificent' W H Auden

By: Jack Hilton
Imprint: Vintage Classics
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 200g
ISBN: 9781784878764
ISBN 10: 1784878766
Pages: 192
Publication Date: 06 March 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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. In 1950, Hilton retired from writing and returned to his first trade, plastering. He died in 1983. The publication rights to Hilton’s works were long considered lost until their discovery in 2022 allowed for the republication of Caliban Shrieks.

Reviews for Caliban Shrieks

A breathless and dizzying modernist howl of a novel -- Andrew McMillan * Guardian * Equal parts autobiography, political screed and artful rant… [Caliban Shrieks] contains an energy that drives the reader on * Observer * A powerful, uncompromising account of working class life… [which] deserves reading and rereading * Socialist Worker * A sharp and compelling work of literary modernism… Caliban Shrieks…speak[s] powerfully to our own time * Morning Star * A singular book in both tone and structure... Hilton’s prose carries the twin forces of indignation and adverse experience * The New Yorker *