E.M. Forster

Born in 1879 in London, Edward Morgan Forster lost his architect father to tuberculosis before his second birthday and was raised by his mother and a circle of female relatives whose affectionate suffocation he would spend a lifetime escaping in fiction. A legacy from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton gave him financial independence and paid for his education at Tonbridge School and King's College, Cambridge, where he discovered the liberating atmosphere of intellectual friendship that shaped everything he wrote. Between 1905 and 1910 he published four novels in rapid succession, including Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howards End (1910), each a comedy of manners that exposed the moral timidity of the English middle class. He visited India twice, and A Passage to India (1924), his masterpiece, laid bare the mutual incomprehension at the heart of the colonial encounter with a subtlety that enraged imperialists and impressed everyone else. Then, at forty-five, he stopped writing novels altogether, unable to publish the book he most wanted to write. That book, Maurice, a story of homosexual love with a happy ending, had been composed in 1913-14 but was published only in 1971, a year after his death. Forster died in Coventry in 1970, at ninety-one, having lived long enough to see the laws that had silenced him finally begin to change.