John Boynton Priestly was born in Bradford on 13th September 1894. He left school at the age of 16 as he realised that the world outside the classrooms and labs would help him become a writer. It was during the period before the First World War that Priestly gained much of the experience, which was to colour his writing career "It was the years 1911-14 that set their stamp upon me." Priestly joined the army when he was 20 and had seen active frontline service in France and had narrowly escaped being killed at least once, and was a victim of a gas attack, these experiences were to have an indirectly influential effect upon his writing. Priestly had managed to achieve consistent success as an essayist throughout the 1920's. It was in 1932 when Priestly wrote his first play. Then Priestly lived through another World War, this time he continued to write and also writing and broadcasting his Sunday night postscripts on BBC radio, but they got cancelled for being to critical of the governments actions under pressure from the ministry of information.
Priestly wrote "An Inspector calls" to get across a point to the nation, the reason he wrote this play was because he could see a visible divide between social classes, and he knew this was wrong, because everyone should be treated the same. Also another point of the play was to show people that if no-one ever changes then things will always stay the same, in the play this is shown by the inspector getting everyone to confess that they had done bad, and only Sheila and Eric had changed, so basically it just happened again, and the point of this is to show that if not everybody changes, things will stay the way they are, it needs everyone to change for it to make a difference on the world. .