E. M. Forster(1879–1970)

Edward Morgan Forster was born in Marylebone on 1 January 1879. From 1883 the family lived at Rooksnest, a house outside Stevenage in Hertfordshire that he loved and later rebuilt almost detail for detail as the title house of Howards End. He went up to King's College, Cambridge in 1897 and was elected to the Apostles, the discussion society that produced the inner circle of what became Bloomsbury, gaining there the lifelong friendships of Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.

The Edwardian decade was his most productive. Where Angels Fear to Tread appeared in 1905, The Longest Journey in 1907, A Room with a View in 1908 and Howards End in 1910. The four books made him, by his early thirties, the most-discussed English novelist of his generation, the one who most clearly inherited from George Eliot and Jane Austen the moral comedy of the English liberal manner. The title-page epigraph of Howards End, Only connect, became the most-quoted sentence in English liberal humanism over the century that followed.

He travelled in Italy and Greece, served with the Red Cross in Egypt during the First World War, and went twice to India, the second time as private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas Senior. Out of those journeys came A Passage to India in 1924, his study of the difficulty of friendship across the imperial barrier and the book that completed his fiction. It is widely held to be his masterpiece.

King's College elected him an honorary fellow in 1946 and he lived in college rooms for the rest of his life, the senior literary figure of mid-century Cambridge. He wrote the essays and broadcasts that carried his reputation through the post-war decades, and the libretto, with Eric Crozier, for Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd, first performed in 1951. He also wrote the novel Maurice, published the year after his death.

He turned down a knighthood three times and accepted the Order of Merit in 1969. He died on 7 June 1970, ninety-one years old. The Forster name in its dominant English form is a variant of Foster, the office of forester rephrased; he was the literary head of the surname for two generations, and the six novels remain at the centre of the English liberal-humanist canon.