Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, Vol. 2: 1921-1970

by E.M. Forster

The letters of the last half of E. M. Forster's life are as engaging as those of his earlier years. Imbued with the same wit, warmth, and vitality, they reveal the breadth of his interests and the great range and enduring quality of his friendships.

After a second trip to India in 1921, Forster finally finished the Indian novel he had begun years before. A Passage to India (1924) capped his career as a novelist; he then turned his energies to essays and other nonfictional prose. In the 1930s he emerged as an active journalist, writing and broadcasting on social and political issues. He fought for civil liberties and led a successful campaign against the BBC's political blacklisting of performers. His correspondents during these years included T. S. Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon, Lennard and Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender.

At seventy Forster began along, happy, and productive new period in his life with his work on the libretto for Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd. In 1960 he was a leading defense witness in the Lady Chatterley trial. By then he was a revered figure among literati and enjoyed advising younger writers. In these last decades he divided his time between his rooms at King's College, Cambridge, and the home of his friends the Buckinghams in Coventry, where he died at age ninety--one.

Genres: Nonfiction

448 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1984

About the author

Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. His humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect".

He had five novels published in his lifetime, achieving his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924) which takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj.

Forster's views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. He is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised for his attachment to mysticism. His other works include Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908) and Maurice (1971), his posthumously published novel which tells of the coming of age of an explicitly gay male character.