Playwright Sherriff wrote his first play to help
Kingston Rowing Club raise money to buy a new boat. Sherriff started writing his seventh play, ''
Journey's End'', probably his most famous, during the summer of 1927 in one of the railway carriage bungalows at
Selsey. It was published in 1929 and was based on his experiences in the war. It was given a single Sunday performance, on 9 December 1928, by the
Incorporated Stage Society at the
Apollo Theatre, directed by
James Whale and with the 21-year-old
Laurence Olivier in the lead role. In the audience was
Maurice Browne who produced it at the
Savoy Theatre where it was performed for two years from 1929. The play was hugely successful and there was wide press coverage which reveals how audience responses provoked by this play shaped understanding of the First World War in the interwar years.
Novelist A novelised version of ''Journey's End'', co-written with
Vernon Bartlett, was published in 1930.
The Fortnight in September, Sherriff's first true novel of 1931, describes a
Bognor holiday enjoyed by a lower-middle-class family from
Dulwich. It was nominated by
Kazuo Ishiguro as a book to 'inspire, uplift and offer escape' in a 2020 list compiled by
The Guardian during the
COVID-19 pandemic. He described it as "just about the most uplifting, life-affirming novel I can think of right now". Sherriff's 1936 novel
Greengates is a realistic novel about a middle-aged couple, Tom and Edith Baldwin, moving from an established London suburb into the new suburbs of
Metro-land. His 1939 novel,
The Hopkins Manuscript is an
H. G. Wells-influenced post-apocalyptic story about an earth devastated after a collision with the Moon. Its sober language and realistic depiction of an average man coming to terms with a ruined England is said to have been an influence on later science fiction authors such as
John Wyndham and
Brian Aldiss. ==Award nominations==