Jack Common was born in 1903 in Heaton, Newcastle, and grew up in the terraced streets backing onto the railway yards where his father worked.The boy Willie Kiddar in Common's account of a Newcastle childhood is a thinly veiled self-portrait, and "Kiddar's Luck" tells the story of his first 14 years, from conception on a Sunday afternoon to leaving school during the First World War. At 25 he moved to London, and worked as assistant editor on "The Adelphi" during the 30s, when George Orwell was his friend and literary mentor, later praising his essay collection "The Freedom of the Streets" (1938) as 'the authentic voice of the ordinary working man, the man who might infuse a new decency into the control of affairs if only he could get there, but who never seems to get much further than the trenches, the sweatshop and the jail'. V.S. Pritchett called it the most influential book of his life. "Kiddar's Luck" was first published in 1951 (and its sequel, "The Ampersand", in 1954). After the commercial failure of his two novels, Jack Common lived in poverty for much of the rest of his life, and died in 1968.