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4. E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
Life

    Edward Morgan Forster was born in 1879, son of an architect. His father died of illness not long after the birth of his son, leaving the boy to be brought up by his mother and aunt. Forster was educated as a dayboy at the Tonbridge School, Kent, an experience responsible for a good deal of his later criticism of the English public school system. He took his B.A. degree in 1901 l and M. A. degree in 1910 at King’s College, Cambridge. Forster became a writer shortly after graduating from King's College. He was the contributor and founder of Independent Review in London from 1902 to 1903. He traveled to Italy, Germany, Egypt and India, becoming acquainted with India in particular. These travels provided many of the settings and situations for his novels and stories. He visited India in 1912 and went there again in 1921, working as private secretary to Maharajah of Dewas, India. During the First World War he went to Egypt as a Red Cross worker. In the meanwhile, he became associated with the Bloomsbury Group in which intellectuals in England met at the house of Woolf’s. After 1925, he stopped writing and devoted the rest of his life to a wide range of literary activities. In the years after the Second World War, he received an honorary fellowship at King’s College, where he spent most of his time. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1969 from Queen Elizabeth. He died in June of 1970 after a series of strokes.
     He began his literary career as journalism and novel writing in 1905. He wrote plays, short stories, travel books and critical works. Forster belonged to the tradition of realism with casual and indifferent narrative tone and direct and informal writhing style. But he combined realism with symbolism through using images and symbols to express his concerns for the social morals and humane values. His first novels were stories about the declining social conditions of Victorianism. These early novels are Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907) and A Room with a View (1908). Forster's first major success, however, was Howards End (1910). He wrote A Passage to India in 1924, inspired by his experience in India. This novel was the last that Forster published during his lifetime. In the 1920s he also published two collections of short stories: The Celestial Omnibus (1922) and The Eternal Moment (1928).

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