Alan Marshall (1) (1902–1984)
Autor de I Can Jump Puddles
Para otros autores llamados Alan Marshall, ver la página de desambiguación.
Sobre El Autor
Créditos de la imagen: Alan Marshall
Series
Obras de Alan Marshall
Obras relacionadas
The Paths I've Trod - Autobiography of an Australian Nurse (1981) — Prólogo, algunas ediciones — 9 copias
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1902-05-02
- Fecha de fallecimiento
- 1984-01-21
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- Australia
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Noorat, Victoria, Australia
- Lugar de fallecimiento
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Miembros
Reseñas
Listas
Premios
También Puede Gustarte
Autores relacionados
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 35
- También por
- 8
- Miembros
- 580
- Popularidad
- #43,223
- Valoración
- 3.9
- Reseñas
- 7
- ISBNs
- 147
- Idiomas
- 8
- Favorito
- 1
Everyone my age knew children and adults who had disabilities from polio, a disease now almost eradicated by the vaccination which became available in the 1950s. Alan Marshall AM (1902-1984) was one of many who had no alternative but to make the best of things at a time when services for the disabled were rudimentary. As a teenager he won a scholarship to study in Melbourne and he eventually began work as an accountant and married and had a family. He went on to make a career as a journalist, and as a writer of short stories, memoir and a novel. He received the ALS Short Story Award three times, the first in 1933, but his politics were radical and according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) many of his contributions to left-wing journals went unpaid.
When Marshall published How Beautiful Are Thy Feet in 1949, it was a story set within living memory of his adult readers, and it's consistent with what the ADB says about his interest in depicting lives blighted by prevailing economic conditions. Drawing on his experience as an accountant at the Trueform Boot and Shoe Company in inner-urban Melbourne, and written in the social realist style of the 1940s and 1950s, it's the story of workers in a failing shoe factory during the Depression.
McCormack, whose crutches are mentioned almost as an afterthought, is mostly referred to as The Accountant, as if to emphasise that he is an observant outsider. He's not a factory worker, he's not in sales, and he's not in management. But he is privy to the financial disaster that is looming, and without breaking the confidentiality of his position, he enables some of the workers to get out with good references before the axe falls. It is not until the end of the novel that he makes a significant intervention which saves three shareholder houses that formed security for the factory from the bank. (I think what he did would be illegal today, (as was continuing to trade when management knew the business was insolvent) but Marshall's sympathies were obviously not with the bank!)
How Beautiful Are Thy Feet vividly depicts working conditions that would not be tolerated today,
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/06/12/how-beautiful-are-thy-feet-1949-by-alan-mars...… (más)