| home page | the collection | news | reviews | contact | education resources | links |
Library of Wales news
"Black Parade" stimulates readers in Barry
Jack Jones, one of the best loved welsh authors of the 20th Century and his novel The Black Parade is the topic of the evening at Barry Library on the 7th of December. His novels featuring Welsh working class life in the early years of the 20th century sold in their hundreds of thousands in their day with titles such as Off to Philadelphia in the Morning and The Black Parade.
Barry Library has added The Black Parade to its reading club list to mark the publication in the Library of Wales series and local Barry reading group Simply Read have taken up the challenge of discussing the book and inviting popular Welsh broadcaster, writer and journalist Mario Basini, who was born in Merthyr and has contributed a foreword to the new edition of the book, to discuss the work of Jack Jones with them. Mario who has recently published a book entitled Real Merthyr will be joined by Library of Wales publishing editor and fiction editor for Seren Books, Penny Thomas.
Jack Jones was born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1884. A writer of numerous novels, plays and autobiographical volumes, he received several awards for his distinguished contribution to the literature of Wales. He was elected first president of the English section of Yr Academi Gymreig. Jack Jones died in 1970.
The Black Parade
One of Merthyr’s Victorian brickyard girls, Saran watches the world parade past her doorstep on the banks of the stinking and rat-infested Morlais Brook: the fair-day revellers; the chapel-goers and the funeral processions. She never misses a trip to the town’s wooden theatres, despite her life ruled by the 5 a.m. hooter, pit strikes, politics and the First World War that takes away so many of her children.
Her Glyn will work a treble shift for beer money; her brother Harry is the district’s most notorious drinker and fighter until he is ‘saved’. The town changes and grows but Saran is still there for Glyn, for Harry, for her children and grandchildren.
In his 1935 novel Black Parade, writer, soldier and political activist Jack Jones creates a superbly riotous, clear and unsentimental picture of Merthyr life as his home-town reels headlong into the twentieth century.
"Black Parade (1935) is strong because... it includes the many-sided turbulence, the incoherence and contradictions, which the more available stereotypes of the history exclude. It can be properly contrasted with... Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley (1939)... widely and properly seen as the export version of the Welsh industrial experience."
Raymond Williams
Written by: The Library of Wales team
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Older news items are stored in our news archive HERE
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
