John Galsworthy

British · 1867 to 1933

Born on August 14, 1867, at Parkfield on Kingston Hill in Surrey, John Galsworthy was the elder son of a wealthy London solicitor and a class-conscious mother who saw herself as above her husband's nouveau riche family. He was educated by a governess, then sent to Harrow, where he captained his house at football, and to New College, Oxford, where he read law and took a second-class degree in 1889. Called to the bar in 1890, he found the legal profession uncongenial and travelled to the South Seas, where on the voyage from Adelaide to Cape Town in 1893 he met the ship's first mate, Joseph Conrad, who became a lifelong friend. In 1895 he began a clandestine ten-year affair with Ada Galsworthy, the unhappily married wife of his cousin Arthur, marrying her in 1905, ten days after her divorce. His annus mirabilis was 1906, when The Man of Property, the first of the Forsyte novels, was published in March, and his first play, The Silver Box, opened at the Royal Court Theatre in December. The Forsyte Saga (1922) gathered the three novels into a single volume that sold over two million copies within months. He campaigned for prison reform, women's rights, animal welfare, and against censorship, refusing a knighthood in 1917 on the grounds that "no artist of Letters ought to dally with titles". He accepted the Order of Merit in 1929 and became the first president of PEN International. In late 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but was too ill to attend the ceremony. He died at his London home on January 31, 1933, aged sixty-five.