A Kingdom

James Hanley was born into a Liverpool-Irish family in 1897. He served at sea (and briefly in the Canadian army) during the First World War, worked at various jobs, educated himself, and began publishing fiction in the 1930s, most notoriously Boy (1931), an unsparing account of sexual abuse on board merchant ships, which became the subject of an obscenity trial. He produced a dauntingly large output (some 20 novels, plays, volumes of stories, and radio dramas), and was held in the highest regard by other novelists, including E. M. Forster, V. S. Pritchett, and Doris Lessing; his reputation was for uncompromisingly realistic accounts of working-class life (The Furys, 1935), of situations of extreme privation (The Ocean 1941), and for compellingly intense, Camus-like portrayals of alienation and disengagement (Levine 1956). A Kingdom was his last completed work, and he died in London in 1985.