Flying a Red Kite - Tapa blanda

It all started towards the end of the 1930s when the young Hugh Hood serviced a flourishing Saturday Evening Post route with more than fifty weekly customers. That was where the author-to-be first encountered the short story, in the formula fiction of the famous magazine writers, Damon Runyon, Guy Gilpatric, Arthur Train, and of course the Master, P.G. Wodehouse. By the '40s, Hood had discovered Pocketbooks, and, in particular, My Life and Hard Times (included in The Thurber Carnival) which led first to a story called `Recollections of the Works Department' and later to some of the methods employed in his opus, The New Age / Le nouveau siècle.

For a writer who once professed `If in the course of my life I can get a half a dozen stories printed, I'll be satisfied', Flying a Red Kite marked a different kind of beginning. The first selection of ten stories was completed in March of 1962 by John Colombo and Robert Weaver for publication by the Ryerson Press. Both editors felt at the time that an additional story was required to round out the sequence to a cohesive volume. Hood wrote `The End of It', and that is how we have it here -- the eleven stories of Hood's first book-length publication, to which the author has added a lengthy introduction and a checklist of bibliographical data.

'The only true biography of the artist, as George Bernard Shaw once observed, is the work itself. The wisdom of this remark is particularly apt in the case of Hugh Hood, a writer whose apparent realism causes many unsophisticated readers to conclude that his work is a shameless transcription of personal experience very thinly disguised as art. Even if it did nothing more than correct this misconception, this new edition of Hugh Hood's first book (originally published in 1962) would be a valuable addition to the shelves of our libraries. ...'Despite the sneers of those who nibble and run, Hood's thirty-year career demonstrates his profound and compassionate sensitivity to our human predicament. This timely reprint of his first volume proves -- if proof were needed -- that he has always been far, far more than a dreary chroniclet of the quotidian. So Flying a Red Kite remains a splendid introduction to all the work of this subtle and prolific author.' Canadian Book Review Annual