E. M. Forster

Introduction to E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster was born in 1879 and died in 1970, his life spanning almost an entire century. His father died when he was an infant, and his mother moved with him to Hertfordshire, where he spent some unforgettable days of his childhood. He studied at Tonbridge public school from 1893 to 1897. He went on to study at Cambridge where he made good friends like John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Desmond MacCarthy, Roger Fry, Alfred Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell. After graduating in 1901, he spent two years traveling in Italy and Greece. He inherited a legacy from his great aunt for which he was forever grateful because it enabled him to lead a life of private means and become a writer.

He published four novels in the first decade of the 20th century, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard’s End (1910). He visited India in 1912-13, and again in 1921-22. He began his first draft of A Passage to India after his first visit and finally completed and published it in 1924. He continued to publish a wide variety of books including a critical work, Aspects of the Novel (1927). He died in 1970.