E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster, the subject of the first Paris Review Writers at Work interview in issue no. 1, was born on January 1, 1879, in London, England. “His concern is with the private life,” wrote Virginia Woolf, his Bloomsbury Group contemporary; “his message is addressed to the soul.” His most famous works—A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924)—deal closely with reconciling the personal self and social conventions amid the rapidly changing world of early-twentieth-century England. In particular, his novel Maurice (1913) portrays a romance between two young men at university, and was published in 1971, following Forster’s death.

Illustration: William Pène du Bois