Short biography of Edward Morgan Forster

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London on the first day of 1879. Edward Morgan Forster was the only child of Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster who was an architect by profession and Alice Clara Lily. Both his parents died in his childhood leaving him with a legacy of 8000 Pounds. This money helped him in his livelihood and enabled him to follow his ambition of becoming a writer. Forster was educated as a dayboy at the Tonbridge School in Kent where the theater got named after him. He then attended King's College, Cambridge, which greatly broadened his intellectual interests and provided him with his first exposure to Mediterranean culture, which counterbalanced the more rigid English culture in which he was raised.

After graduating from King’s college he started his career as a writer; his novels being about the varying social circumstances of that time. In his first novel ‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’, which was published in 1905. Between 1905 and 1924, Forster published five novels, most notably “Howards End” and “A Passage to India.” For the following 46 years, however, until his death in 1970, he wrote no more novels, merely a few short biographies, some essays and literary journalism.

 However, Forster's first major success was Howards End (1910), a novel centered on the alliance between the liberal Schlegel sisters and Ruth Wilcox, the proprietor of the titular house, against her husband, Henry Wilcox, an enterprising businessman. Forster spent three wartime years in Alexandria doing civilian work and visited India twice. After he returned to England, inspired by his experience in India, he wrote A Passage to India (1924).

In 1911 Forster  published several short stories with a rustic and unpredictable writing tone. These include “The Celestial Omnibus” and “The Eternal Moment”. He also wrote for many magazines like “The Athenaeum”. Forster was one of those Englishmen who found freedom, inspiration and relief in places like India and Egypt. The old age of this great Englishman was much cheered up by trips to America, by the sly knowledge that he had a hidden manuscript, by the rooms he was given at King’s College, Cambridge, which were his main residence between his mother’s death and his own death.