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John Galsworthy<-novels<-chapter 8<-contents<-position

II English Novels from 1900s to 1950s
1. John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
Life

    John Galsworthy was born into a well-off family in Surrey in 1867. His father was a lawyer and a director of several companies, mother a daughter of a manufacturer. He received education at Harrow School, Middlesex from 1881-1886, then in New College, Oxford, where he graduated with honors in law. Then he was admitted to the bar in 1890. He traveled widely and met Joseph Conrad in 1892 who became his life-long friend. He started his writing career from 1895, at first for his amusement, when he found writing was the most enjoyable in life. He married Ada Person Cooper in 1905, a woman who became the inspiration of many his novels. During the First World War he worked for the Red Cross, and helped refugees in Belgium. He got the order of Merit in 1929 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1932. John Galsworthy died on January 31, 1933.
     Galsworthy was English novelist and playwright of international fame. In his lifetime Galsworthy wrote 17 novels, 26 plays and 12 collections of short stories, essays and poems etc. His early novels written under the pen name John Sinjohn were From the Four Winds (1897), Jocelyn(1898), Villa Rubein (1900), and A Man of Devon (1901). His first novel under his real name was Pharisees (1904). Galsworthy’s novels dealt with the life of the upper class and their decline. His reputation of novels mainly rested on his trilogies, in which The Forsyte Saga was the first. It included Man of Property (1906), In Chancery (1920), and To Let (1921). The three novels appeared with two “interludes”. The two interludes were Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1918) and Awakening (1920). The first trilogy was followed by its sequel trilogy, A Modern Comedy, which consisted in The White Monkey (1924), The Silver Spoon (1926) and Swan Song (1928). His Forsyte novels were adapted on television and enjoyed popularity by many Europeans.
     As a playwright of considerable technical skill, his plays often took up specific social problems. The Silver Box (1906) is about the double standard of justice as applied to the upper and lower classes. Strife (1909) is dealing with the confrontation of capital and labor. His other major plays are Justice (1910), The Mob (1914), and The Skin Game (1920).

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