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 exploitation, solitary confinement, the repression of women, jingoism, and the morality of war. He campaigned for animal welfare, prison reform, censorship reform, and workers' rights, though he never joined a party. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932, a year before his death in 1933; the plays are rarely staged now, but the novels keep returning, and a 26-part BBC adaptation in 1967 pulled the Forsytes back into the centre of public attention.