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Hurry on Down
Last week saw the publication of a 60th Anniversary Edition of John Wain's classic novel from the 1950s, Hurry on Down, with a new introduction by Dr Nick Bentley, Senior Lecturer in English Literature/RI Humanities.
John Wain was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1925 and attended school in Newcastle-under-Lyme, before reading English at St. John's College Oxford. His debut novel, Hurry on Down, became recognized as the first of a trend in the 1950s and 60s for fiction that looked critically at the class system in Britain, and it set the standard for later works such as Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, and the Angry Young Man novels of John Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Keith Waterhouse. Wain also published poetry, literary criticism and cultural commentary, and he became an important voice in literary and cultural debates during the period.
Nick Bentley was invited by the publishers Valancourt Press (Kansas City) to provide the introduction to this new edition in its anniversary year. Nick's research covers 1950s fiction, and there is a chapter in his book Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (2007) comparing Hurry on Down with Lucky Jim.
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