This image is the cover for the book Growing Up in the West, Canongate Classics

Growing Up in the West, Canongate Classics

Four literary works portraying both the gritty beauty and the brutality of Glasgow and western Scotland in the mid-twentieth century.

Includes:
Poor Tom by Edwin Muir
Fernie Brae by J. F. Hendry
From Scenes Like These by Gordon M. Williams
Apprentice by Tom Gallacher

Introduced by Liam McIlvanney, award-winning author of The Quaker, Growing Up in the West presents four very different and memorably vivid accounts of what it was to be young and growing up in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, from the 1930s to the 1960s. Poor Tom tells of a young man’s struggle to come to terms with the slow death of his brother in the city slums of a culturally impoverished Scotland. Fernie Brae celebrates the growth and education of a sensitive youth in a novel reminiscent of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Gordon Williams’s novel From Scenes Like These tells a grimmer story as its young protagonist eventually succumbs to a culture of drink and violence in which the harshness of life on the land sits next to industrial sprawl. Finally, set in the Clydeside shipyards, the wryly observant and humorous style of Apprentice strikes a happier note from the 1960s.

Edwin Muir, J.F. Hendry, Gordon M. Williams, Tom Gallacher

Born in Orkney in 1887, Edwin Muir is best known as a poet. When he was fourteen his family moved to Glasgow, and Poor Tom reflects something of the trauma of that experience.J.F. Hendry was born IN Glasgow in 1912. He was an influential poet and editor of the New Apocalypse movement in the 1940s, along with G.S. Fraser and the young Norman MacCaig.Gordon M. Williams was born in Paisley in 1934. After he left school and became a reporter and settled in London. His other books include Walk Don't Walk and The Siege of Trencher's Farm, filmed by Sam Peckinpah as Straw Dogs.Tom Gallagher was born in Dunbartonshire in 1934. One of the most successful Scottish dramatists of the 1970s, his plays include Mr Joyce is Leaving Paris (1970) and Revival! (1972). Apprentice is the first in a series of three books following the career of the same character.Dr Liam McIlvanney is a Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen. He has published on modern Scottish writing and is the author of Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (2002). He is General Editor of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies and a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.

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