Galsworthy, John 1867-1933
English novelist and playwright, and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Coombe, Surrey, he was educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford, and was called to the Bar in 1890, but chose to travel and set up as a writer. He met Joseph Conrad and they became lifelong friends. He published his first book, a collection of short stories, From the Four Winds, in 1897, under the pseudonym John Sinjohn. In 1906 he had a success with his first play, The Silver Box, and in the same year published The Man of Property, the first in his celebrated Forsyte Saga series - the others being In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921). In these novels he describes both nostalgically and critically the life of the affluent middle class which ruled England before World War I. The second cycle of the saga, A Modern Comedy (1929), includes The White Monkey (1924), The Silver Spoon (1926) and Swan Song (1928), and examines the plight of the postwar generation, whose world has collapsed. Among his other novels are The Island Pharisees (1904), The Country House (1907), Fraternity (1909) and The Patrician (1911). A prolific playwright, he produced more than 30 plays for the London stage, including Strife (1909), Justice (1910), The Skin Game (1920), A Bit o' Love (1915) and Loyalties (1922). They best illustrate his reforming zeal, and also his sentimentality, for while technically first-rate theatre, they are marred, especially in the later ones, by the parsimony of his dialogue. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1932.

Bibliography: D Holloway, John Galsworthy (1968)