Jack Hilton Caliban Shrieks

THE LOST MODERNIST MASTERPIECE From a childhood of poverty but deep joy and high-flying freedom, to the hard-knock reality of physical labour, and then the ideological idiocies of life of a solider, Caliban Shrieks takes its readers on a lyrical tour of life as a young man born into the first days of the 20th century. Turned out of the war a vagrant -- seeing England from city to city, county to county -- before being tossed back into an uncertain cycle of working-class life as it unfolds in the post-war years, Hilton's autobiographical novel is both a brash, impassioned indictment of the conditions of the working-class, as it is a bold modernist retelling of the myth of wild men, disfigured, disenfranchised, and sold into slavery. Lost to time, only to be rediscovered again in the Salford's Working Class Movement Library in 2022, Caliban Shrieks is a masterpiece of both modernist and working class literature, and continues to speak as angrily and impassioned today, as it did on its first rave publication in 1935.