Patrick Hamilton (1904—1962) was born into a literary family
and became active in the theater at a young age. He was a prolific
writer, both of fiction and for the stage, and a notorious
alcoholic. Among his most famous novels are Hangover Square and The
Slaves of Solitude (NYRB Classics).
Susanna Moore is the author of the novels My Old Sweetheart,
The Whiteness of Bones, Sleeping Beauties, In the Cut, One Last
Look, and The Big Girls, as well as a book of non-fiction, I Myself
Have Seen It. She lives in New York City.
"The rediscovery of English writer Hamilton (Hangover Square, The
Slaves of Solitude) continues with this tale of obsessive love in
the low-rent pubs of 1930s London - so evocatively rendered you
almost smell the smoke and spilt ale." --Newsday “No other
English writer has written so acutely about sexual infatuation,
embarrassment and self-delusion.” –Time Out “Unsurpassed as a
recorder of lonely urban existence in the mid-20th century.” –Lynne
Truss, The Times [UK] “Hamilton is a master at reproducing the
inflated talk of betrayed lives.” –The Independent [UK] “The
wonderful 1935 trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, is
set in a pub off the Euston Road. Every detail is spot on;
Hamilton’s remorseless eye weaves an atmosphere as thick as bar
smoke.” –The Independent [UK] “Bleak and brilliant…an
authentic lost classic.” –The Guardian “A little-known classic
of English literature.” –Seattle Times “When I came upon
Hamilton's name in this book, I got out Hangover Square and found,
just as my Penguin edition blurbed, "one of the great novels of the
20th century." (Suffice it to say that Hamilton writes about street
life with an honesty and lyricism, an absence of sentimentality or
fetish for squalor, that should make nearly every hard-boiled
writer hang his or her head in shame.)” –Charles Taylor,
Salon.com “Patrick Hamilton is being revived again. And it
looks serious this time… JB Priestley was an early supporter.
Hamilton's book The West Pier was generously described by Graham
Greene as "the best novel ever written about Brighton". He was John
Betjeman's favourite contemporary novelist. Writers from Julie
Burchill to Doris Lessing are warm admirers. Biographer Michael
Holroyd has written numerous essays and introductions. Nick Hornby
recently described him as 'my new best friend'.” —The Independent
[UK] “Until recently, my bedside table has been tilting under
the weight of various Victorian novels; now I'm planning a book
with a post-war setting and have put myself on a diet of slimmer,
mid-20th-century works…Most exciting, however, has been Patrick
Hamilton's fiction: I am halfway through The Slaves of Solitude,
his nervy, hilarious study of the claustrophobic awfulness of
British boarding-house life; now I have his trilogy, Twenty
Thousand Streets Under the Sky, to look forward to.” –Sunday Times
[UK] “[Hamilton’s] scenes of pub life (and much of the action
of the trilogy takes place off those 20,000 streets in an array of
licensed premises) are perfectly realized. They enable him to bring
a near-Dickensian sense of the comic to a gallery of the most
appalling pub bores. It is certainly worth the attention of a new
generation of readers.” –The Birmingham Post [UK] “This
reprinted classic well deserves its shelf space with new novels…The
magic lies in Hamilton's ability to get inside the head of his
rather tragic and innocent characters, and in his power of
description, especially of pubs. The atmosphere of 1920s-30s London
hostelries and the joys of having a drink in them makes you long to
be there, watching one of the scenes he so vividly describes unfold
in the corner.” –Coventry Evening Telegraph Hamilton captures
the "authentic atmosphere of what it was like to live in England
between the two world wars". –Michael Holroyd "He is a
master." –J. B. Priestley “Patrick Hamilton was a marvelous
novelist who’s grossly neglected...I’m continually amazed that
there’s a kind of roll call of OK names from the 1930s, sort of
Auden, Isherwood, etc. But Hamilton is never on them and he’s a
much better writer than any of them…He wrote more sense about
England and what was going on in England in the 1930s than anybody
else I can think of, and his novels are true now. You can go into
any pub and see it going on.” –Doris Lessing, The Times
[UK] “A magnificent portrait of the renting twilight class of
1930s London. Too bleak for its own times, its nihilism suited us
just fine.” –Daily Telegraph “A criminally neglected British
author.” –Daily Telegraph “My big discovery of the year has
been Patrick Hamilton. His trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under
The Sky, written in the 1920s, is a beauty - one of the finest
books I've ever read.” –Dan Rhodes, Sunday Glasgow
Herald “I've gone Patrick Hamilton crazy. I was blown away by
the superbly excruciating Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky ,
and I'm going to track down some of his out-of-print novels. He
writes brilliantly about infatuation and drunkenness - two subjects
close to my heart.” –Dan Rhodes, The Observer [UK] "It's
rainswept and melancholy–just my kind of stuff.” –Phil Davis, The
Times [UK] “Hamilton wrote a world into being that still
exists: a London world of smoky pubs and bedsits, homeless
individuals and forlorn lovers, people at the pictures, people in
Soho, English men and women living in and around the centre of the
city's capital in the first decades of the last century, people
full of yearning and loneliness. He was a poet of the foggy
lamplight and the nicotine-stained ceiling, and we mustn't forget
him. We daren't. We are still in need of his intelligence and his
moral insight.” –Daily Telegraph “A writer I love is Patrick
Hamilton…I am reading his trilogy, which is called Twenty-Thousand
Streets Under the Sky. His world is a world of thwarted dreams in
the 1920s and '30s. His writing is phenomenally good.” –Wesley
Stace, The Newark Star-Ledger “Hamilton was an expert at
describing the simple sadnesses of unfulfilled lives” –The
Observer “Hamilton was the son of a tyrannical, drunken
barrister and a failed actress. He published his first novel at 19,
establishing himself as one of the bright young novelists of the
1920s and 1930s, only to be knocked over by a car at the height of
his career and badly disfigured. Despite professional success, his
work reflected his life -rootless and depressed, buffeted by failed
relationships and awash with alcohol -and he died in 1962 of
cirrhosis of the liver.” –The Times [UK] “Funny and moving
trilogy of low-life love affairs in 30s SoHo” –The Times (UK)June
27, 1987 “Writers such as Lynne Truss and Nick Hornby are
proclaiming his genius. Hamilton is about to be ‘rediscovered.’”
–The Daily Telegraph
Hamilton...loves his ominous narratives. He’s a sort of urban
Hardy: everyone is doomed, right from the first page....It’s sad,
but Hamilton’s laconic narrative voice is always a joy to read, and
as a social historian, Hamilton is unbeatable.
— Nick Hornby
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