E. M. Forster | Books, Biography, eBooks, Audiobooks

About This Author

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879, attended Tonbridge School as a day boy, and went on to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1897. With King’s he had a lifelong connection and was elected to an Honorary Fellowship in 1946. He declared that his life as a whole had not been dramatic, and he was unfailingly modest about his achievements. Interviewed by the BBC on his eightieth birthday, he said: ‘I have not written as much as I’d like to . . . I write for two reasons: partly to make money and partly to win the respect of people whom I respect . . . I had better add that I am quite sure I am not a great novelist.’ Eminent critics and the general public have judged otherwise and in his obituary The Times called him ‘one of the most esteemed English novelists of his time’.

He wrote six novels, four of which appeared before the First World War, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard’s End (1910). An interval of fourteen years elapsed before he published A Passage to India. It won both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Maurice, his novel on a homosexual theme, finished in 1914, was published posthumously in 1971. He also published two volumes of short stories; two collections of essays; a critical work, Aspects of the Novel; The Hill of Devi, a fascinating record of two visits Forster made to the Indian State of Dewas Senior; two biographies; two books about Alexandria (where he worked for the Red Cross in the First World War); and, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Britten’s opera Billy Budd. He died in June 1970.

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Books by thisAuthor

(34)

A Room With a View
An Englishwoman steps out of social convention to find true love in E. M. Forster's delicately balanced and enchanting story.
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Howard's End
Art and commerce, nature and industry, idealism and pragmatism, women and men: the struggles, partings, and reconciliations between these pairs drive the narrative of one of the great English novels of the twentieth century. One of the newest additions to The Longman Cultural Editions series,Howards Endpresents the complete text headed by an inviting introduction, and supplemented by helpful annotations; a table of dates to track its composition, publication, and public reception in relation to biographical, cultural and historical events; and a guide for further inquiry and study.
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The Longest Journey
The works of English essayist, novelist and short story writer, E.M. Forster, rank in the sphere of such influential writers as James Joyce, William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf for their remarkable humanist views and emphasis on the conflicts of English social classes. Forster's own favorite of his works, "The Longest Journey" touches on themes of family, sexuality, preoccupation with material society, and the necessity of passion in life. This novel is considered to be the most autobiographical of Forster's works, and explores his most humanistic views through the life of Rickie Elliot, a young man whose upbringing and education reflects the author's own experiences. Rickie's journey from childhood, through school, the discovery of an unknown brother, and later marriage serves as an example to readers of all generations of the necessity for personal connections, and more importantly passion, in every person's life.
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Where Angels Fear to Tread
A wonderful story of questioning, disillusionment, and conversion, Where Angels Fear to Tread tells the story of a prim English family's encounter with the foreign land of Italy. When attractive, impulsive English widow Lilia marries Gino, a dashing and highly unsuitable Italian twelve years her junior, her snobbish former in-laws make no attempts to hide their disapproval. But their expedition to face the uncouth foreigner takes an unexpected turn when they return to Italy under tragic circumstances intending to rescue Lilia and Gino's baby.
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A Room with a View
This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England. A charming young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza. Attracted to this man, George Emerson--who is entirely unsuitable and whose father just may be a Socialist--Lucy is soon at war with the snobbery of her class and her own conflicting desires. Back in England she is courted by a more acceptable, if stifling, suitor, and soon realizes she must make a startling decision that will decide the course of her future: she is forced to choose between convention and passion. The enduring delight of this tale of romantic intrigue is rooted in Forster's colorful characters, including outrageous spinsters, pompous clergymen and outspoken patriots. Written in 1908, A Room With A View is one of E.M. Forster's earliest and most celebrated works.
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Maurice
A Novel
Set in the elegant Edwardian world of Cambridge undergraduate life, this story by a master novelist introduces us to Maurice Hall when he is fourteen. We follow him through public school and Cambridge, and on into his father's firm, Hill and Hall, Stock Brokers. In a highly structured society, Maurice is a conventional young man in almost every way, "stepping into the niche that England had prepared for him": except that his is homosexual. Written during 1913 and 1914, immediately after Howards End, and not published until 1971, MauriceÂ was ahead of its time in its theme and in its affirmation that love between men can be happy. "Happiness," Forster wrote, "is its keynote. In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad businessman and rather a snob. Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that puzzles him, wakes him up, torments him and finally saves him."
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A Room With a View
A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman, Lucy, in the repressed culture of Edwardian England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century.
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Howards End
Centennial Edition
A 20th-century classic on British society's class warfare, as seen through the eyes of three different castes. Howards End, a house in the Herefordshire countryside, is the source of conflict between these parties-and ultimately a symbol of class conflict in England.
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The Machine Stops
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture
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Howards End
In Howard's End, E.M. Forster unveils the English character as never before, exploring the underlying class warfare involving three distinct groups--a wealthy family bound by the rules of tradition and property, two independent, cultured sisters, and a young man living on the edge of poverty. The source of their conflict--Howards End, a house in the countryside which ultimately becomes a symbol of conflict within British society.
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A Passage to India
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Britain’s three-hundred-year relationship with the Indian subcontinent produced much fiction of interest but only one indisputable masterpiece: E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, published in 1924, at the height of the Indian independence movement. Centering on an ambiguous incident between a young Englishwoman of uncertain stability and an Indian doctor eager to know his conquerors better, Forster’s book explores, with unexampled profundity, both the historical chasm between races and the eternal one between individuals struggling to ease their isolation and make sense of their humanity.
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Abinger Harvest
This collection of articles, essays, reviews, and poems, written by the author of A Passage to India, contains such well-known pieces as "Notes on the English Character,' 'Adrift in India," and "Me, Them and You." Also collected are essays on literary figures whose work Forster especially admired.
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A Room with A View
A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the repressed culture of Edwardian England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. Merchant-Ivory produced an award-winning film adaptation in 1985. - Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Two Cheers For Democracy
Essays that applaud democracy's toleration of individual freedom and self-criticism and deplore its encouragement of mediocrity: "We may still contrive to raise three cheers for democracy, although at present she only deserves two."
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Alexandria
A History and a Guide
The aim of the Abinger Editions is to provide a new, properly edited library of the literary works of E.M. Forster that does justice to his literary genius. The latest in the series is "Alexandria," written while Forster was in Egypt during the First World War. This edition collates and compares all the existing editions of the work to provide the definitive version of the text. It also contains the subsequent work by Forster, "Pharos and Pharillon."
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Howards End
"Backgrounds and Sources" presents a rich selection of Forsterâs previously unpublished journals and letters and his working notes, which bring readers into the long and painstaking creative process that culminated in Howards End. "Criticism" presents a superb selection of critical writing about the novel. The critics include Edward Garnett, A. C. Benson, Katherine Mansfield, Frieda Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, and six interpretations by Wilfred Stone, Barbara Rosecrance, Perry Meisel, Kenneth Graham, Elizabeth Langland, and Fredric Jameson. A debate on the successes and shortcomings of cinematic adaptation is presented through "Reviews of the Merchant-Ivory Film."
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Selected Stories
Although he is best known for his exquisite novels, E.M. Forster also wrote remarkable short stories. He referred to his stories as fantasies and his attraction to myth and magic is apparent in many of them. Like his novels, the stories whether they are set in Italy, Greece, India, and other places Forster visited, or in England itself contrast the freedom of paganism with the restraints of English civilization, the personal, sensual delights of the body with the impersonal, inhibiting rules imposed by society. Rich in irony and alive with sharp observations on the surprises life holds, the stories often feature violent events, discomforting coincidences, and other disruptive happenings that throw the characters perceptions and beliefs off balance. This volume includes all twelve stories published during Forsters lifetime.
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Science Fiction Classics
The first full-color volume in the Graphic Classics series features an all-new comics adaptation of H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" by Rich Rainey and Micah Farritor. Also E.M. Forster's dark vision of the future "The Machine Stops", illustrated by Ellen Lindner. Plus stories by Jules Verne, Stanley Weinbaum, Lord Dunsany and Arthur Conan Doyle, with art by Brad Teare, George Sellas, Roger Langridge, Johnny Ryan and Hunt Emerson.
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Eternal Moment And Other Stories
A collection that explores the human spirit through a series of fantasy vignettes, including "The Machine Stops," "The Point of It," "Mr. Andrews," "Co-ordination," "The Story of the Siren," and the title story.
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The Longest Journey
E. M. Forster once described The Longest Journey as the book "I am most glad to have written." An introspective novel of manners at once comic and tragic, it tells of a sensitive and intelligent young man with an intense imagination and a certain amount of literary talent. He sets out full of hope to become a writer, but gives up his aspirations for those of the conventional world, gradually sinking into a life of petty conformity and bitter disappointments.
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