E. M. Forster

Forster was educated at Cambridge, where he joined the secretive discussion society the Apostles and found the tolerant intellectual circle that shaped his lifelong liberalism. Between 1905 and 1910 he published four novels in rapid succession, Where Angels Fear to Tread, A Room with a View, and Howards End among them, establishing him, still in his twenties, as a major novelist of Edwardian England.

Two trips to India, including a stint as private secretary to a Maharajah, gave him the material for A Passage to India (1924), which became both his masterpiece and his last published novel; he lived another forty-six years without releasing another. He had written Maurice, a novel of homosexual love, as early as 1913–14, but kept it in a drawer, unpublishable under British law criminalizing homosexuality; it appeared only in 1971, a year after his death at ninety-one.