E. M. Forster holds a rather unusual position in English literature. By the age of thirty-two he had gained recognition for four out of the five novels that were to appear in his lifetime. After that he published little for fourteen years, then achieved an international reputation with his prize-winning, best-selling, and much-debated novel about India and the British in India, A Passage to India (1924). Except for a slim volume of short stories written many years before, he did not publish any new fiction during the remaining years of his life, but he was far from forgotten. Though never a prolific writer, he was esteemed for his criticism, a few biographies, books dealing with his travels in Egypt and India, and particularly for his essays on more general topics, some of which have become classics. His unfaltering advocacy for his distinctive and personal brand of liberal humanism in...