Walter Greenwood

Writer, born in Salford, Greater Manchester, NW England, UK. His best-known novel is Love on the Dole (1933), inspired by his experiences of unemployment and depression in the early 1930s. It made a considerable impact as a document of the times, and was subsequently dramatized in 1934 and filmed in 1941.

Walter Greenwood (December 17, 1903 – September 13, 1974) was an English novelist, best known for the socially influential novel Love on the Dole (1933).

Greenwood was born in Hankinson Park, Salford in Lancashire, the son of radical working class parents.

While unemployed he wrote his first novel Love on the Dole in 1932, about the destructive social effects of poverty in his home town.

Although he never matched the success of Love on the Dole, he produced a succession of novels during the 1930s: His Worship the Major (1934), The Time is Ripe (1935), Standing Room Only (1936), Cleft Stick (1937), Only Mugs Work (1938), The Secret Kingdom (1938) and How the other Man Lives (1939).

During the Second World War Greenwood produced films for the British government, and served in the Royal Army Service Corp.

After the war he wrote the Trelooe trilogy – So Brief the Spring (1952), What Everybody Wants (1954) and Down by the Sea (1956) – and a few plays: Cure for Love (1947, filmed 1950), Too Clever for Love (1952) and Saturday Night at the Crown (1958). He retired to Douglas, Isle of Man in the 1950s, and wrote his autobiography, There Was A Time (1967).