Background
George Blake was born on October 28, 1893, in Greenock, Scotland.
University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ, United Kingdom
Blake studied law at University of Glasgow.
(In The Shipbuilders, Blake focuses on his strength: reali...)
In The Shipbuilders, Blake focuses on his strength: realistic detail of Glasgow’s economic struggles. The novel tells the story of Leslie Pagan, whose friend Danny is left without work when Pagan’s Yard shuts down.
https://www.amazon.com/Shipbuilders-George-Blake-2004-06-01/dp/B01K95RJ1I/?tag=2022091-20
1936
George Blake was born on October 28, 1893, in Greenock, Scotland.
Blake studied law at the University of Glasgow.
After the war, Blake began to write for the Glasgow Evening News and eventually became the literary editor of the paper. At the same time, Blake began to produce his early plays, essays, and novels. Blake’s early work did enable him to make a living at letters. In 1923, Blake was able to support a wife, Ellie Malcolm Lawson, and in 1924, he became an editor at John O'London's Weekly. He published The Wild Men (1925) and Young Malcolm (1926) soon thereafter with reasonable success.
Blake was also successful as an editor. He was named a director of Faber and Faber publishers in 1930, and in 1932, he became editor of Faber and Faber’s Porpoise Press. While there, Blake produced David and Joanna (1936), a love story that some critics found lacking in structure. Just after David and Joanna, however, Blake produced one of his strongest fictions, The Shipbuilders (1936).
(The novel tells of a boy who makes a brilliant career as ...)
1926(The Path of Glory draws on Blake’s own experiences at Gal...)
1929(This novel describes the career of a gang queen in the sl...)
1923(In The Shipbuilders, Blake focuses on his strength: reali...)
1936(In this novel, the author attempts to tell of the Scottis...)
1928Blake maintained a lawyerly, argumentative approach to fiction writing: his novels and plays always served a purpose and always sought to establish truth and justice. His writing was also influenced by his work as a journalist. Blake’s fiction was impressive in its ability to mirror the world of the working-class in Glasgow, but it faltered, in many critics’ views, in the realm of emotionally evocative storytelling. As a matter of fact, Blake’s writing is notable for its lack of sentiment, though his early work also lacked some coherence, according to some critics.
Critics admired Blake’s ability to portray a difficult world without flinching but found his fictionalizing skills somewhat weakened by the force of his realism.
Quotes from others about the person
"Blake’s stories are sometimes prolix and predictable in style but always surefooted in their assessment of the effects of money on a cash-starved, conservative society. He carved out a small niche for himself as a regional writer, depicting the lives of working-class Glaswegians and residents of Greenock.” - Eric Thompson
“Blake was being thought of as one of the Scottish literary renaissance realists, a group that included the poet Hugh MacDiarmid and the novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Blake shared with them a determination to present social turmoil in urban life in a realistic manner. Like them, too, he repudiated the sentimental themes of Kailyard (Scottish for ‘cab-bage patch’), the late nineteenth-century style of rural poetry, drama, and fiction that had become the standard of what Scottish writing should be.” - Eric Thompson
“What is important in Blake's work is his strength as a regional author who helped to shape the evolution of Scottish fiction.” - Eric Thompson
George Blake married Elbe Malcolm Lawson, in 1923. They had two sons and one daughter.