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Seller's Description:
Fine in Good jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. BOOK: Spine Bumped; Light Shelf Rub to Boards; Edges Lightly Soiled; Moderate Yellowing Due to Age. DUST JACKET: Lightly Creased; Lightly Chipped; Moderate Yellowing Due to Age; In Archival Quality Jacket Cover. SUB-TITLE: An Autobiography. SYNOPSIS: "I sneaked rather shamefacedly into the world on February 22, 1913...I was martially, not physiologically a seven months baby." In 1919, the family moved from England to Canada and settled in Toronto's Cabbagetown district--referred to then as "the largest Anglo-Saxon slum in North American." "In my childhood we kids had everything going for us except money for clothes, fruit juices, and a stomach full of food, and what we didn't have we didn't particularly miss." It was a time of laughs and disappointments, the beginning of a growing awareness and a special perception--a writer's perception--that recreates in this memoir the times and places and characters of the era. "I left technical school on my sixteenth birthday (there had been all sorts of odd and part-time jobs before) and the next day began work as copy boy on the Toronto Star." Then he quit--or was fired--and took it on the lam riding the freights during the Depression across Canada and the U.S., coast-to-coast, the Bay to the Gulf, ending up in New York's Bowery--and that's when he first got the inspiration to be a writer. With the outbreak of war in Spain in 1937, Hugh Garner pulled up his socks, donned the beret of the International Brigades and joined the Abraham Lincoln Battalion as machine-gunner. The return to Canada was less than exciting: fruitless efforts at writing, various odd jobs at berry and tobacco picking in Southern Ontario. And then the War. He enlisted in September, 1939 in the Royal Canadian Artillery, but was released because of "Communist affiliations." He hitchhiked to Halifax, joined the Navy and served in the Atlantic Convoy until 1945. Now all this was just the beginning. From then on, it was "one damn thing after another! " The serious efforts to make a living as a writer in spite of financial obligations to his family: days in factories, nights in seedy rooming houses full of drunks and weirdos. The first completed manuscript, the first book the first cheque--and also the hundreds of rejections that preceded and followed the earliest successes. One Damn Thing After Another is the account of a Cabbagetown boy trying to get somewhere, trying to "make it, " with nothing more than talent and determination. It is a story told with hilarity and sensitivity and in autobiography it is a unique and delightful addition to Canadian and world literature.
