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I Fell for a Sailor (Paperback, Revised ed.)
Loot Price: R491
Discovery Miles 4 910
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I Fell for a Sailor (Paperback, Revised ed.)
Series: The Fred Urquhart Collection
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Loot Price R491
Discovery Miles 4 910
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Originally published in 1940, Fred Urquhart's first collection of
short stories brings to life the modern Scotland of the 1930s,
using his inimitably vivid dialogue. He shows the struggles of
working-class women, whether labouring in a sweatshop, facing death
in a tuberculosis hospital or seeking escape on a bike of her own.
His male characters also have problems, caused by army life,
religion or homosexuality in a period of oppression. Life is
sometimes overshadowed by the approach of war. But there is comedy
too, for example a fraught day at Glasgow's Empire Exhibition of
1938. And Urquhart looks beyond Scotland, with the story of a young
American woman and her sailor, a sketch of an Italian soldier in
the Spanish Civil War and a comic tale of a film director in Hell.
Fred Urquhart (1912-1995) was born in Edinburgh and spent much of
his childhood there, where his grandparents lived, and later he
worked in an Edinburgh book shop for some years ('my university').
He is best known as a superb short story writer. When he began to
write it was the heyday of short story magazines, and this was the
only obvious way to earn a living as an author. He spent the war in
the north-east of Scotland, a conscientious objector relegated to
farm work: his stories of this are agreed to rival Grassic Gibbon
and Jessie Kesson. But later he went to London, finding the louche
world of Soho more to his taste than Edinburgh correctness. Later
he lived in the country in a 'happy homosexual marriage' and he did
not return to Scotland until 1991, after his partner's death. The
Ferret Was Abraham's Daughter (1949) and Jezebel's Dust (1951) are
his two great novels of Edinburgh's poorer citizens in wartime.
Having admired Fred Urquhart's work for many years, Colin Affleck,
a fellow native of Edinburgh, became a friend of his on his return
to Scotland in 1991. Urquhart later appointed him as his literary
executor. Among Dr Affleck's writings on Urquhart is a study
focussing on his short stories, which appeared in British
Short-Fiction Writers, 1945-1980 (edited by Dean Baldwin). Dr
Affleck is now working on a biography of Urquhart.
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