John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy was born into a prosperous Surrey family in 1867, trained for the law at Oxford, and qualified as a barrister without much intention of practising. A voyage to the South Seas changed his life: on the ship he met Joseph Conrad, then a merchant seaman, and the friendship helped turn him toward fiction. His early books appeared under the name John Sinjohn, a disguise he discarded when his work began to find an audience.

He wrote novels and plays about the genteel English world he knew from the inside — property, marriage, law, class and the quiet damage done when respectability is treated as a moral principle. The Forsyte Saga made him famous, but he was equally serious about the theatre. His plays exposed prison conditions, industrial conflict and the treatment of women without giving up his instinct for a well-made scene.

Galsworthy received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932, too ill to travel to Stockholm. He died the following year. The achievement most often attached to him is a style of social criticism that seems mild until one notices how little room it leaves for the complacent to hide.