John Galsworthy Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on John Galsworthy

The older son of a wealthy solicitor, John Galsworthy was expected to carry on the family's newly achieved commercial success. A member of the bar although he rarely practiced, he began his writing career at a relatively late age. He was almost twenty-eight before, at the suggestion of his cousin's wife, Ada Galsworthy, with whom he was in love and later married, he began to write seriously. He practiced writing fiction laboriously, modeling his early work on that of Turgenev and Maupassant. His work began to be published in 1897, his first two novels and first two volumes of short stories appearing under the pseudonym John Sinjohn. Still regarding himself as the literary apprentice, Galsworthy absorbed patiently the advice of his literary friends, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Edward Garnett. Although he had earlier worked on a play, tentatively entitled "The Civilized," revising and reworking scenes before he finally abandoned it unfinished, Galsworthy first became well known through the success of The Man of Property, the second novel published under his name.

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