Patrick Hamilton: A Life by Sean French (1993 hardcover)

by Sean French

£100 · Offered by eBay

1993 Faber & Faber hardcover edition. Light reading wear, some toniing to pages, blank endpaper removed else good condition. From the dustjacket: Patrick Hamilton (1904-62) led a life of extraordinary successes and failures. He achieved international fame at the age of twenty-four with his very first play, Rope, and ten years later repeated the trick with his ‘Victorian melodrama’, Gaslight. With its successful Broadway run, this play made Hamilton a very wealthy man. Yet in his own view, and in that of his more discerning admirers like J. B. Priestley, John Betjeman and Graham Greene, his novels were his major achievement. With The Midnight Bell he established himself as a chronicler of seedy urban life, of the rootless world of boarding houses, pubs, Lyons Corner Houses and endless London streets. Despite a succession of major novels - Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude in the forties, The West Pier and Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse in the fifties - Hamilton was to remain at best a writers’ writer, and when he died at fifty-eight of alcohol-related illnesses, his reputation was at a low ebb. Until now Hamilton’s life has been portrayed as a tragic disaster. He emerged from a family of eccentric failures, cursed by alcoholism and presided over by a bizarre father who wrote terrible novels and cobbled together his own premature version of fascism. Hamilton's private life was a blend of alcohol, sexual failure, Marxism, golf and, most importantly, his writing. Making full u

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 1993
• Binding: Hardcover
• ISBN: 0571143539
• Condition: Good

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