Biography Essay

During the first decade of the twentieth century, John Galsworthy was widely regarded as one of England's leading writers. As a novelist and a playwright, he was commercially successful and critically esteemed. After World War I and until his death in 1933, Galsworthy remained one of Britain's most widely read and widely translated authors, even as younger, more experimental writers proclaimed his fiction obsolete. In November 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. By 1950, however, Galsworthy's reputation had widely and radically declined, especially among academic critics who followed the lead of his earlier detractors—such as Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence—and pointed to his not infrequent lapses into sentimentality and his tendency to "over-write." But as an increasing number of commentators are pointing out, Galsworthy was much more than an earnest "middlebrow" entertainer. Aside from his impressive accomplishments as a playwright, Galsworthy...