Not necessarily the stuff of Hollywood dream factories, and indeed, during his lifetime, Forster rejected bids to film his novels, fearful how they would be adapted. Yet after his death in 1970, five of his six novels--including his posthumously published homosexual novel, Maurice, have been adapted for motion pictures. The Longest Journey is the only Forster novel to yet escape such cinematic adaptation. Incredibly, Forster is widely known for his works long after his death, by a movie-going generation. This is a fitting irony for a writer whose works were critically acclaimed during his lifetime, but never overly popular with the reading public.
The adjectives "great" and "important" are often used to describe Forster, but another one, "elusive," according to Philip Gardner in E. M. Forster, The Critical Heritage, is equally apropos. "In the profoundest sense," noted John Sayre Martin in his E. M. Forster: The Endless Journey, "Forster's elusiveness is a quality of his mind--a mind at once humanistic and sceptical." Martin further observed, "Unlike the nineteenth-century novelist whose assured tone derives in great measure from his subscription to a publicly acknowledged code of values, Forster, without such a code, is tentative and exploratory."
There is nothing tentative or exploratory, however, about the Forster industry that has developed to describe every nuance and utterance of this great English stylist.
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