The Thirty-First of June
by J. B. Priestley
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Description
With this book, Priestley takes his readers off into the realm of satirical fable. Sam finds himself in the kingdom of Peradore in Arthurian England. He must take on the infamous Red Knight & the dragon if he is to win the Princess' hand in marriage.Tags
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Member Reviews
This is a novella that began life as a play. The theme is mob psychology, and the effects of this condition on reality, or at laest human behaviour. If everyone believes it is the thirty-first of June, so it is even if we haven't had one before now, and never will again. In most ways the label on a day doesn't matter. What matter is what happens on that day whether it is correctly labelled, or not. Some of the lines are funny, but I hope this is a lesser work of Priestly's, not his major opus.
Not one of Priestley's great novels. Unlike the blurb I found this vaguely amusing, not the rollicking romp I expected. Having said that I found it readable and undemanding.
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Modern Arthurian Fiction
237 works; 16 members
Best Neglected Fantasy Books 1900-1955
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Author Information
233+ Works 6,938 Members
English novelist, playwright, and critic J. B. Priestley was born in Bradford in Yorkshire, the setting for many of his stories, and was educated at Cambridge University. Although he first established a reputation with critical writings such as The English Comic Characters (1925), The English Novel (1927), and English Humor (1928), it is for his show more novels and plays that he is best known. Priestley was, like John Galsworthy and Somerset Maugham, a novelist only partially committed to his playwriting. Yet he became the dominant literary figure in the London West End during the 1930s, as he attempted to make realistically rendered domestic conversation the vehicle for a mature study of personality and emotion. Philosophical theories about time, Socialist dogmatism (often erupting into sermons), and a taste for dramatic expressionism may be said to have finally deflected him from his goal. Priestley's experimental bent nevertheless yielded, among his more than 25 plays, a number of striking theatrical situations---the soliloquies of Ever since Paradise, the reviewed life in Johnson over Jordan (1939), the replay of an ill-fated conversational turn in Dangerous Corner (his most successful play, 1934), and the supernatural visitation in An Inspector Calls (his acknowledged masterpiece, 1946). (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 828.9108 — Literature & rhetoric English & Old English literatures English miscellaneous writings English miscellaneous writings 1900- English miscellaneous writings 1900-1999 Prose
- LCC
- PR6031 .R6 .T — Language and Literature English English Literature 1900-1960
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 41
- Popularity
- 714,318
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (2.81)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 2
