E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 ? 7 June 1970) was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924). He also wrote numerous short stories, essays, speeches and broadcasts, as well a limited number of biographies and some pageant plays. He also co-authored the opera Billy Budd (1951). Today, he is considered one of the most prominent and successful of England's Edwardian novelists. Born into a comfortable middle-class family, Forster was the only child of Alica Clara Foster and Henry Morgan Foster. His father died before he reached the age of two, and thereafter he was raised by his mother and a variety of other female relatives, first in a country cottage in Stevenage, and then in a smaller village near Tunbridge Wells. After attending Tonbridge School as a day-boy, he went on to study History and Classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he met fellow future writers such as Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. He then travelled throughout Europe before publishing his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread in 1905. Many of his novels examine class difference and hypocrisy. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 20 separate years.