On All Fool's Day 1919 Alfred Edgar Coppard left his job as a clerk-cost accountant at the Eagle Ironworks in Oxford to live alone in a cottage at Shepards Pit, where he began to re-create himself as A. E. Coppard, author. Although the most dramatic, this was not the first of his transformations, nor was it the last time he gave himself a new name to express his new identity. He was forty-one years old. He had written about a dozen short stories since 1912 and had finally published six in late 1918, and he was now prepared to make fifty pounds in savings sustain him until he gained the literary recognition that he craved.

He stayed at Shepards Pit for three years, living mostly on raw vegetables and writing much poetry and several more short stories. His first collection of short stories had been turned down by such publishers as...