Humphrey Jennings (1907-50) has long been recognised as one of Britain's greatest film directors. His studies of national life, and particularly his three war time films Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started, and A Diary for Timothy, invaluable documents of their times, remain among the highest achievements of world cinema. Jennings's films are rich due to the drama of subject matter and the range of passions and skills he brought to his work. He was a gifted painter, a key member of the Surrealist movement; a poet and a literary critic; a founder of the Mass Observation movement, and a historian who assembled an anthology of writings about the Machine Age, Pandaemonium.

The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader tells the story of his brief, varied life in his own words, using many previously unpublished letters, treatments and screen-plays. It reprints all of his unpublished critical writings on literature, painting and other subjects (most of them unavailable in book form since the 1930s), the texts of his radio broadcasts for the BBC, and a selection of his poems.