Sid Chaplin was an acclaimed author of novels, essays and short stories, one of the finest writers working in the North in the 20th century and a great influence on a later generation of writers who followed his example, including John Braine, Melvyn Bragg and Alan Plater.The son of a miner who became a pitman himself, his early work brilliantly and tenderly chronicled the mining life he observed around him, in the villages in which he grew up by the River Wear in County Durham.To mark the centenary of his birth in 1916, this new collection of stories, essays and poems features the very best of this work, capturing the culture which more or less created the modern North-East but which is now lost forever. In between these pieces his son Michael Chaplin traces his father's early life and the inspiring story of how in the face of many obstacles he became a successful writer. In a concluding essay he returns with the photographer Karen Atkinson to the three villages which meant so much to his father to discover their story since he left them and create an affectionate evocation of landscape, people and place.