Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born 2 June 1840 in South West England, a region whose declining rural life would anchor nearly everything he wrote. He worked as a Victorian realist novelist, influenced by George Eliot and the Romantics, and his fiction cut hard at the social machinery crushing ordinary people - especially those outside the cities. Far from the Madding Crowd arrived in 1874, then The Mayor of Casterbridge in 1886, Tess of the d'Urbervilles in 1891, Jude the Obscure in 1895: tragic characters hemmed in by passion and circumstance, all set in his semi-fictional Wessex, a map drawn from Dorset through Devon and Hampshire. He'd written poetry his entire life and thought of himself primarily as a poet, but his first collection didn't appear until 1898. Younger poets, particularly the Georgians, claimed him as a mentor; after his death on 11 January 1928, Pound, Auden, and Larkin elevated the verse even higher. The novels made him famous; the poems made him LastingBold.