Jack Hilton | |
|---|---|
| Born | 21 January 1900 Oldham, Lancashire, England |
| Died | 1983 (aged 83) Oldham, Greater Manchester, England |
| Occupation | Novelist, travel writer, essayist, plasterer |
| Alma mater | Ruskin College |
| Subject | Working-class life, the labour movement, unemployment, socialism, polemic, autobiography |
| Years active | 1930 - 1950 |
| Notable works | Caliban Shrieks Champion English Ways Laugh At Polonius English Ribbon |
| Signature | |
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Jack Hilton (21 January 1900 – 26 May 1983) was a British outsider novelist and essayist adopted into the modernist movement of the 1930s. Hilton's works were experimental, using semi-autobiographical first-person narratives and internal monologue to probe the relation of events in his life - and the lives of his characters - to the feelings and attitudes of himself and his subjects. His writing was also unconventional at the time of its publication for its proud but critical depictions of working-class people and settings, centring on his native Lancashire.
Born into a large working-class family, Hilton grew up in a slum before starting work in a cotton mill at the age of eleven. He fought in the First World War before a period of several years as a vagabond. Upon settling in Rochdale in the latter half of the 1920s, he took up odd jobs in the building trade. During the Great Depression he began to organise for the National Unemployed Workers' Movement. After a protest in 1932 for which he was imprisoned in Strangeways, Hilton was barred by a magistrate from involvement in the organisation of future protests or political actions with the NUWM. He turned to writing instead, and soon afterwards a tutor of his at the Workers Educational Association stumbled upon a notebook containing drafts by Hilton. The tutor posted the texts to the modernist literary editor John Middleton Murry who invited Hilton to contribute to his magazine, The Adelphi. Hilton's contributions evolved into his debut novel Caliban Shrieks, published in 1935.
Through the brief literary career that followed, Hilton became a good friend of the writers George Orwell and Jack Common. He disappeared from literature at the end of the Forties and returned to plastering, out of disillusionment with the publishing industry.