Arnold Bennett

Born in 1867 in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, Bennett was steered toward law by his solicitor father but pivoted after clerking in London at twenty-one, editing a women's magazine before going full-time as an author in 1900. He moved to Paris in 1903, steeped himself in French literature, and married a Frenchwoman in 1907; the decade abroad loosened his crippling shyness. Back in England by 1912, he set much of his fiction in a fictionalized Potteries he called The Five Towns - realist novels like Anna of the Five Towns and The Old Wives' Tale that sold widely to ordinary readers. The accessibility that made him rich also made him a target: modernists scorned his popularity, and his reputation cratered after his death in 1931 from typhoid, contracted after drinking tap water in France. Late-century scholars revived him, recognizing novels like Clayhanger and Riceyman Steps as the major works they are.