E. M. Forster

E.M. Forster was born in London on January 1st, 1879. His father died when he was young, and after school he went to King’s College, Cambridge in 1897. There, he became a member of the Cambridge Apostles, an exclusive intellectual society. After finishing university, he started writing novels, completing his first in 1905. He traveled throughout Europe and also spent some time in India. In his writings, he explored early 20th-century English society and its contradictions, as he does in A Room With a View, published in 1908. Forster found greater success, though, with his novel Howards End in 1910. During World War I, Forster volunteered in Egypt and afterwards spent more time in India. While in England, he was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of London writers and intellectuals including Virginia Woolf. In 1924, drawing on his own experiences in India, Forster published perhaps his best known novel, A Passage to India, which explores the experiences of British colonists and Indians during the British colonial occupation of India. Forster spent his later years in England, continuing to write short stories and essays (but no more novels) until his death in 1970. He garnered much fame and recognition as an author during his lifetime, and was even offered a knighthood (he declined) and awarded the Order of Merit. Today, he is remembered as one of the most important British novelists of the 20th century.