British · 1894–1984
J. B. Priestley was an English novelist, playwright, essayist and broadcaster. Born in Bradford, he served in the British Army in the First World War, studied at Cambridge, and then made his living as a writer in London. His novel The Good Companions (1929) made him famous. He wrote many plays, among them Dangerous Corner, Time and the Conways and An Inspector Calls, which first appeared in 1945 and is still a set text in British schools. During the Second World War his Sunday evening radio talks, Postscripts, drew large audiences with their plain-spoken call for a fairer postwar society. He helped found the Common Wealth Party and was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. His work often deals with social responsibility and with theories of time. He refused a peerage but accepted the Order of Merit in 1977. He died in 1984.