Walter Greenwood
Walter Greenwood was an English author and playwright born on December 17, 1903, in Salford, Lancashire, to working-class parents. Growing up in a culture that appreciated reading and radical politics, he educated himself despite dropping out of school early. His early adult years were marked by a series of low-paying jobs and periods of unemployment, experiences that informed his writing. Greenwood achieved notable success with his first novel, *Love on the Dole*, published in 1933, which resonated with readers during the Great Depression due to its authentic portrayal of life on unemployment relief.
Over his extensive career, he produced more than forty works, including novels, plays, and screenplays, and became known for his proletarian fiction. *Love on the Dole* was adapted into a stage play in 1934 and later made into a film and musical. While not considered a sophisticated literary stylist, Greenwood's strengths lay in his realistic dialogue, strong characterization, and genuine insights into working-class life. His influence and contributions to literature and drama spanned over three decades, reflecting the struggles and resilience of the working-class experience.
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Subject Terms
Walter Greenwood
Playwright
- Born: December 17, 1903
- Birthplace: Salford, Lancashire, England
- Died: September 13, 1974
Biography
Walter Greenwood was born on December 17, 1903, in Salford, Lancashire, England, to working-class parents. He began working when he was twelve and left the local council school the next year, but he had grown up in an English proletarian culture that valued reading, music, and radical politics, and he continued to educate himself. Until he was thirty, Greenwood struggled to support himself through an extremely varied series of relatively unskilled, low-paying jobs that were punctuated by periods of unemployment. When his first novel, Love on the Dole, succeeded in 1933, he might have been expected at last to marry Alice Miles, to whom he had long been engaged, and whom he had used as a model for the heroine of his novel. He did not, and in January of 1936 she sued him for breach of promise.
In September of 1937, Walter Greenwood married Pearl Osgood, an American actress. Love on the Dole was the most successful of the more than forty novels, plays, and screenplays that Walter Greenwood wrote in a career that lasted more than thirty years. He had firsthand experience of life on “the dole”—another name for unemployment relief—and Love on the Dole succeeded in the depths of the Great Depression because of the timeliness of its message and the authenticity of its author’s vision. Walter Greenwood went on to write more proletarian fiction: He wrote several more novels and an autobiography that read like a novel.
The popularity of Love on the Dole led him to adapt it to the stage in 1934. Later Love on the Dole became a film, and it was even turned into a musical (in 1970). Greenwood’s growing familiarity with dramatic forms and techniques led him to playwriting, which accounted for an increasing proportion of his artistic output. He also devoted himself more and more to screenwriting, both for the cinema and for television. Walter Greenwood was not a sophisticated literary stylist, and he was not an experimentalist in any genre. Rather, his strengths lay in the realism of his dialog, the strength of his characterization, and the authenticity of his proletarian perception.