James Hanley (novelist)

James Hanley
Liverpool waterfront
Born	(1897-09-03)3 September 1897 Kirkdale, Liverpool, Lancashire, England, UK
Died	11 November 1985(1985-11-11) (aged 88) London, England, UK
Resting place	Llanfechain, Powys, Wales, UK
Occupation	Novelist, playwright, radio and television dramatist, and short story writer
Literary movement	Expressionism, Modernism, English literature, Welsh literature in English
Notable works	Boy, The Furys, The Closed Harbour, Levine
Spouse	Dorothy Enid "Timothy" Thomas (neé Heathcote)

James (Joseph) Hanley (3 September 1897 – 11 November 1985) was a British novelist, short story writer, and playwright of Irish descent. He published his first novel Drift in 1930. The novels and short stories about seamen and their families that he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s included Boy (1931), the subject of an obscenity trial. Hanley came from a seafaring family and spent two years at sea himself. After World War II there was less emphasis on the sea in his works. While frequently praised by critics, Hanley's novels did not sell well. In the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s he wrote plays, mainly for the BBC, for radio and then for television, and also for the theatre. He returned to the novel in the 1970s. His last novel, A Kingdom, was published in 1978, when he was eighty.

Born in Kirkdale, Liverpool, Lancashire, in 1897 (not Dublin, nor 1901 as he generally implied) to a working class family. Both his parents were, on the other hand, born in Ireland, his father Edward Hanley around 1865, in Dublin, and his mother, Bridget Roache, in Queenstown, County Cork, around 1867. However, both were "well established in Liverpool by 1891", when they were married. Hanley's father worked most of his life as a stoker, particularly on Cunard liners, and other relatives had also gone to sea. James also grew up living close to the docks. He left school in the summer of 1910 and worked for four years in an accountants' office. Then early in 1915, aged 17 he went to sea for the first time (not 13 as he again implied). Thus life at sea was a formative influence and much of his early writing is about seamen.

Then, in April 1917, Hanley jumped ship in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, and shortly thereafter joined the Canadian Army in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Hanley fought in France in the summer of 1918, but was invalided out shortly thereafter. After the war he worked as a railway porter in Bootle and he devoted himself "to a prodiguous range of autodidactic, high cultural activities – learning the piano, regularly attending […] concerts […] reading voraciously and, above all, writing." However, it was not until 1930 that his novel Drift was accepted.