E. M. Forster

Forster's father died before he was two, and he was raised by his mother and a circle of aunts. One of them, Marianne Thornton, left him eight thousand pounds when he was eight — enough, in that era, to make a career of writing possible without a salary. He said plainly that his life's work rested on it.

He wrote four novels between 1905 and 1910, then went to India twice, once as private secretary to a maharajah, and published A Passage to India in 1924. He was forty-five. He lived another forty-six years and never published another novel.

One had already been written. Maurice, finished in 1914, is a love story between two men that ends happily — which, he noted, was the reason it could not be published: unhappiness would have been permissible, a happy ending was not. He kept it in a drawer, showed it to friends, and left it to appear in 1971, the year after his death.

He spent much of his later life in rooms at King's College, Cambridge, broadcasting, writing essays, declining a knighthood, and offering democracy, in a famous phrase, two cheers rather than three.