The 1935 novel Caliban Shrieks was praised by Orwell and Auden before being forgotten for decades.
A skeleton reaching for a loaf of bread on the book cover caught Jack Chadwick's attentionA 1930s novel that was acclaimed by George Orwell and WH Auden before being forgotten for decades is to be republished after a Manchester bartender rediscovered it and solved a mystery about the author's last wishes.
He put up posters asking "Do you remember Jack Hilton?", which eventually led him to track down the widow of a friend, who was unaware she had inherited the author's estate. Orwell even asked to come and stay with Hilton in Rochdale to write his own account of English working-class life. Hilton didn't have room, but suggested a friend in Wigan instead. That led Orwell to write his landmark The Road To Wigan Pier, which was published two years after Caliban Shrieks.
Hilton went on to write several more books, but went out of fashion and out of print after World War Two, when one countess at a leading publishing house was said to have told him that "the proletarian novel is dead".Seven decades later, a tattered copy of the book caught Chadwick's eye at Salford's Working Class Movement Library. He was soon engrossed by the book and intrigued by the fact it and its author seemed to have been largely forgotten.
Chadwick put up the appeal posters in pubs near Hilton's last address. In one, before he had finished his pint, a woman approached him and gave him the names of the writer's two best friends.
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