Books about Richard Hughes by/edited by Richard Poole
Richard Hughes, Novelist by Richard Poole
(Poetry Wales Press 1987)
"I first met Richard Hughes at Coleg Harlech, the Welsh Residential College for Adults, in September 1973. The occasion was a weekend course organized by the English language Section of Yr Academi Gymreig, the Welsh Academy. After I had chaired a talk given by Hughes on the future of the novel, Hughes asked me whether I'd mind if he attended, on the following morning, a lecture I was giving on his work. I said I wouldn't. So, next day, each of us found himself undergoing a unique experience: I talking about the work of an author present in my audience, and Hughes listening to a lecture on his novels. Certainly he didn’t make it difficult for me: whenever I looked towards where he sat at the back of the room, I saw him sitting hunched forwards, staring at the back of the chair in front of him. He never looked directly at me. When, afterwards, I asked him what the experience of being lectured about was like, he replied that it was a very strange experience. Why? – because many of the things I had found in his books were not things he had consciously put there…"
- from the Foreword
Richard Hughes, Novelist is a critical biography and was the first book-length study ever published of the intriguing author whose most famous work is A High Wind in Jamaica. Part One, the first third of the book, comprises a compressed account of Hughes's life. Part Two discusses Hughes's early work in poetry and the short story and for the theatre (he wrote the first ever play for radio) before proceeding to readings of his four novels. Hughes thought deeply about the nature of fiction and this section includes two short chapters on his fictional theory.
Contents:
Foreword
PART ONE: A Life, and Letters
1. Childhood and University
2. Playwright and Novelist
3. In Hazard and the War
4. The Human Predicament
PART TWO: Richard Hughes: Novelist
5. The Early Work
6. Theory (1)
7. A High Wind in Jamaica
8. In Hazard
9. Theory (2)
10. The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Fiction as Truth: Selected Literary Writings by Richard Hughes
Edited by Richard Poole
(Poetry Wales Press 1983)
Fiction as Truth is a selection of essays, forewords, and book reviews by Richard Hughes in most cases extracted from a variety of publications, many defunct, but in a few previously unpublished. The selection spans fifty years of the novelist's writing life. Its contents are divided into four sections bracketed by an Introduction by the editor and a Bibliography of Hughes's writings.
Contents:
Introduction
Autobiographical
A preface to his Poetry
Illogical and the Child
The Birth of Radio Drama
Introduction to A High Wind in Jamaica
Fear and In Hazard
Introduction to In Hazard
On The Human Predicament
On Fiction
Under the Nose and Under the Skin
The Writer's Duty
The Novel Behind Your Eyes
I. Literature and the Plastic Arts
II. Why Do We Read Novels?
Fiction as Truth
Four Talks
The Relation of Nationalism to Literature
The Poet and the Scientist
The Voice and the Pen
Liturgical Language Today
Books and Authors
W. E. Henley
John Skelton
Mrs Dalloway
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
The Lawrence Letters
Robert Louis Stevenson: a Centenary Tribute
Mr Forster's Quandary
Virginia Woolf
Joyce Cary
George Borrow: Victorian Rebel
Dylan Thomas: the Real tragedy
Laughter from the Doldrums
On Welsh Literature
Faulkner and Bennett
Bibliography
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