In 1978 Frank Swinnerton published his sixty-first book, Arnold Bennett: A Last Word. Two years earlier, at the age of ninety-two, he published his forty-first novel, Some Achieve Greatness. It is clear that he was one of the most prolific of British novelists. His career as a novelist spans nearly seven decades, beginning with The Merry Heart (1909). As a contemporary not only of Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy but also of the "second" generation of novelists Virginia Woolf mentions in her now-famous essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," Swinnerton's work spans the entire history of what is often called the modern novel.

Frank Swinnerton was born in Wood Green, a suburb of London, on 12 August 1884, the youngest son of Charles and Rose Cottam Swinnerton. According to Swinnerton's autobiography, both the elder Swinnertons and Cottams were fiercely independent artisans "totally outside class." His father was...