The Complete Works of Walter Greenwood (1933 – 1967): a Gallery

This page gives a quick overview of all Greenwood’s published works by reproducing the first edition dust wrappers of each of his published novels, plays, and non-fiction texts. Some of his plays were performed but not published, so these are not represented here, and likewise a number of works in draft which did not make it to publication. Those pieces of writing apart, the page offers a visual guide to the complete works of a working-class writer who is mainly remembered for a single (if very influential) novel published when he was thirty years old. As many of these covers make clear, Love on the Dole was what made his name, but it did not exhaust all his creative energy, and his subsequent publications kept him and the issues he raised in his first novel about poverty and unemployment, as well as new issues about British society, in the public mind for a further thirty-four years just during his own lifetime. All of the dust wrappers or cover designs reproduced here are scanned or photographed from copies in the author’s collection. I have kept commentary to a minimum so that readers can gain a swift overview of Greenwood’s oeuvre as represented by his dust wrapper and cover designers (I think he was generally very fortunate with his illustrators). For a detailed discussion of how cover designs relate to the contents of these books, as well as images of subsequent editions and translations, see: Walter Greenwood’s Dust-Wrappers and Covers 1933 to the present