E. M. Forster
English novelist of A Passage to India, whose humanist fiction examines class and hypocrisy Show bio
Bio
E. M. Forster lost his father to tuberculosis before his second birthday. He grew up between a doting mother and his father's strict, religious family. Forster inherited £8,000 from a great-aunt, enough to live on as a writer.
He traveled to India in 1912 and visited his close friend Syed Ross Masood. Forster began his novel A Passage to India on his return, and dedicated it to Masood.
He finished Maurice, a love story between two men, in 1914 but never saw it published. Forster carried that early pull between his mother and his father's family into his themes.