J. B. Priestley

J. B. Priestley was an English novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and broadcaster, born John Boynton Priestley in 1894 in Bradford and educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he switched from English to History and graduated in 1921. He achieved early success with the novel The Good Companions (1929), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and became equally known as a playwright, especially for An Inspector Calls (1945), a time-slip drama of social responsibility, alongside Dangerous Corner and Time and the Conways. During the Second World War his BBC radio broadcasts reached some sixteen million listeners and shaped wartime morale and political debate. Priestley twice declined national honors, a life peerage in 1965 and Companion of Honour in 1969, before accepting the Order of Merit in 1977. He died in 1984.