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Jack Common (1903 – 20 January 1968) was a British socialist, essayist and novelist.〔(Fanfare for the Common Man, Newcastle Chronicle )〕 ==Writing== Common's writing was warm, ironic and quirky. He soon won admirers throughout the 1930s as a writer with a genuine proletarian viewpoint, as distinct from the purveyors of middle-class Marxist fiction. He was invited in 1930 by John Middleton Murry, founder and editor ''The Adelphi'', who had noticed an essay he had written, to become circulation promoter and later assistant editor of the magazine. For a period in 1936 he was acting editor, and a collection of his articles ''The Freedom of the Streets'' appeared in 1938. V.S. Pritchett considered the book to have been the most influential in his life, and George Orwell heard in the essays 'the authentic voice of the ordinary working man, the man who might infuse a new decency into the control of affairs if only he could get there, but who in practice never seems to get much further than the trenches, the sweatshop and the jail.'〔''The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 1 – An Age Like This 1945–1950'' (Penguin)〕 E. M. Forster also praised Common as a "warm-hearted, matey writer."〔E. M. Forster, "The Long Run", ''The New Statesman'', 10 December 1938. Reprinted in P. N. Furbank,(ed.), ''The Prince's Tale and Other Uncollected Writings''. London : Andre Deutsch, 1998. ISBN 0233991689 (p.291)〕 He inspired, prefaced and edited the compilation ''Seven Shifts'' (1938), in which seven working men told of their experience. Common and Orwell became friends, corresponding and occasionally meeting when Common was running the village shop in Datchworth, Hertfordshire, about ten miles from Orwell's Wallington cottage. The impractical Orwell asked Common's advice on setting up his own shop. After the war he was engaged in writing film scripts including ''Good Neighbours'' (1946), about a community scheme in a Scottish town; he also travelled to Newfoundland and Labrador on another film assignment. In 1951 Turnstile Press published Common's best-known book, the autobiographical ''Kiddar's Luck'', in which he vividly describes his childhood on the streets of Edwardian Tyneside, as seen through the lens of his adult socialism. There are four chapters on his life before five years old – a feat of detailed memory – while his mother's alcoholism and the overbearing father whom Jack at length dramatically defies, form the dark background to the vigorous, at times bravura, narrative. The book found praise as a slice of Geordie naturalism, a convincing depiction of 'the other England' which so beguiled the imagination of contemporary intellectuals. On the other hand, its irony and subtly bitter universality went largely unrecognised. In ''The Ampersand'' (1954) Common took the story further, but his publishers went into liquidation two years later. Neither book had been a commercial success and Common had not completed the trilogy with his long-promised ''Riches and Rare'', a novel set in Newcastle at the time of the General Strike. Too early (or too old) to be an angry young man of the 1950s, Common was unable to sustain a career in writing. His political attitudes were by now out of fashion, and when he sent the manuscript of ''In Whitest Britain'' (1961) to his friend Eric Warman in London, Warman replied in a letter of 7 June 1961 that he was sorry 'such a bloody good writer' could not achieve success. There was too much 'class distinction' in the book, and the downtrodden, golden-hearted workman was a dated 'leading cliché'. Thus Jack Common, perhaps the finest chronicler of the English working class to follow Robert Tressell, spent his last years in Newport Pagnell writing film treatments at poor rates. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jack Common」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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