John Galsworthy

Born in 1867 to the prosperous upper-middle-class world he would later dissect, Galsworthy trained as a lawyer but found it bloodless and published his first book at thirty in 1897. Success arrived nearly a decade later in 1906 with The Man of Property, the opening volume of what became The Forsyte Saga, a multi-novel sequence tracking a single family from the late 19th century to the early 1930s; the patriarch, Old Jolyon, was modelled on his own father. That same year his first play, The Silver Box, opened in London, launching a second career as a dramatist known for work that pressed on exp…