Spiral ascent Books In Order
- In The Thirties (1961)
- The Rotten Elements (1969)
- No Home But the Struggle (1979)
Novels
- Journey to the Border (1938)
Collections
- The Railway Accident and Other Stories (1969)
- The Night Walk and Other Stories (1987)
- An Unmentionable Man (1994)
- The Mortmere Stories (1994)
- The Scenic Railway (1997)
- The Coming Day and Other Stories (2000)
- A Renegade in Springtime (2003)
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Edward Upward Books Overview
Journey to the Border
This, one of the most remarkable of English novels of the 1930s, first published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, has long been out of print. Now Upward, at age ninety, has carefully revised his acclaimed and partly autobiographical work. As a psychological study it is intense; as a social document it gives insight into the political developments occurring prior to World War II; and as prose it is refreshing and extraordinarily effective. As Malcolm Muggeridge observed, ”Upward’s technique is like Kafka’s. There is the same overlapping of objective and subjective reality, producing a weird yet poignant impression of the pathos of human life. Journey to the Border is often brilliant, and most brilliant when it is hallucinatory.” Times Literary Supplement.
An Unmentionable Man
In this new set of stories, the first of Upward’s to be published since The Night Walk and Other Stories, he observes personal relationships and social change through the eyes of a gardener, an elderly writer, a young war widow, and Fred and Lil, pensioners who have difficulty adjusting to the new surroundings of their retirement and to neglectful relatives. Frank Kermode’s overwhelming enthusiasm for Upward’s past and present work is in itself a great recommendation. ”…
Reflecting on his achievements in a very long career, one cannot help thinking that Upward presents in his work a reliable record of an extraordinary period of history. His unique blending of the past, in art as well as in politics, still has lessons for the future.” Frank Kermode
The Mortmere Stories
Although legendary in literary and academic circles, these sometimes gothic, sometimes grotesque, and often hilarious stories are published here for the first time. Christopher Isherwood and his old school friend, Edward Upward, were Cambridge undergraduates in the early 1920s when they engaged in a literary attack on the dons and the ”poshocracy” the fashionable and wealthy students. The stories are important milestones, offering a glimpse of the initial literary styles of two authors who later became famous the meticulous, experimental, intellectually rigorous Upward, and the prodigiously talented Isherwood creating an extraordinary world in an engaging manner. ”A bit of wickedly funny ephemera.” A Different Light Newsletter.
The Scenic Railway
A dying man finds affirmation in a career to which he had unsuccessfully given his life, a retired and cautious man finally has the courage to ask the woman he loves if she will come to live with him, a dying woman’s dreams of revolutionary events seem to be coming true Upward’s stories give ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary. These five new, carefully rendered, quiet tales retain that unique mix of art and politics so crucial to the literature of the 1930s and 1940s for which he and his circle were so famous.
The Coming Day and Other Stories
These stories one novella length, six shorter testify to Edward Upward’s continuing creativity into his mid nineties. They interweave elements from every period of his work: railway accidents and Kafkaesque dreams recall his earliest; concern for the survival of humanity maintains the left wing commitment of his middle years; and the more contemplative note of his later writings now deepens with the themes of aging, bereavement, and death. The protagonists are threatened by a malevolent state and socio political violence but are sustained by visions of a better future and the restorative of sexual love. The precise observation and lucid dialogue which always marked Upward’s fiction, still makes a powerful impression. The title story is about Cedric, who absconds from a residential home and crosses the divide from reality to fantasy. His picaresque journey takes him to such places as an abattoir hung with human corpses; a football riot; and a private school run by a pedophile.
A Renegade in Springtime
Born in 1903, Edward Upward was a member of the celebrated Auden generation of young poets and novelists. This selection of twelve of his best short stories spans a literary career of almost eight decades, and is being published to celebrate his centenary. Beginning in 1928, with the fantastical world of Mortmere Christopher Isherwood and Upward both wrote tales about this place while they were at Cambridge together in ”The Railway Accident,” the stories continue through the era of political engagement in the 30s to the reflective and poignant studies of old age that have underpinned a recent revival. Together, they represent a lifetime of achievement in modern literature. Edward Upward’s first novel was published in 1938 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.