Biography Essay

During the Edwardian years and into the 1920s, E. M. Forster consolidated his reputation as a novelist of distinction and as a persuasive man of letters. He attained the greatest recognition and authority after World War II when, except for work on Maurice (1971; the first draft was completed in 1914) and the most important of the short stories that were first published in The Life to Come and Other Stories (1972), he had ceased the writing of fiction. Though his repute and influence have suffered since his death in 1970, he still commands the respect and enthusiasm of critics and general readers alike for his many virtues as fiction writer and essayist. His gifts are manifest and manifold: an ability to imagine characters and situations of surpassing aesthetic and human significance; a speculative power and a philosophical acuteness; moral seriousness, sensitivity, and catholic sympathies; a wide aesthetic range both...