Growing Up in the Gorbals: The Ralph Glasser Omnibus

"I was driven to write these books because the spirit of the Gorbals would not leave me and insisted that I give expression to its continuing power and its lessons for our society." -Ralph Glasser

Ralph Glasser's Gorbals Trilogy is an extraordinary account of a remarkable life. In Growing Up in the Gorbals, Glasser describes his childhood and adolescence in the impoverished slums of the Glasgow tenements in the 1920s and the hardships and heartaches that went with it. At 14, he left school to become a barber's soap boy but he soon started the night classes that would eventually lead him to a scholarship to Oxford. In Gorbals Boy at Oxford he describes his new life, the incredible characters he met and the arrogance of Oxford academic life, and in Gorbals Voices, Siren Songs, Ralph Glasser's brilliant trilogy concludes in the wayward world of postwar London.

Ralph Glasser spent his childhood and adolescent in the Old Gorbals of Glasgow. After years of night study he won a scholarship to Oxford. A psychologist and economist, he was concerned for many years with development problems, mainly in the Third World, campaigning against the destruction of traditional communities.