John Galsworthy was a novelist and dramatist who began publishing just before the end of the nineteenth century. The series of novels for which he is now best known,
The Forsyte Saga, is historical, since its story begins forty years before the first in the series appeared. In 1921 John Galsworthy became first president of the
PEN Club (later
PEN International) founded by
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott and
Violet Hunt, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922.
Milestones
14 August 1867 JG, novelist, dramatist, and poet, was born at
Coombe in
Surrey.
Spring 1897 Under the pseudonym 'John Sinjohn', JG published his first collection of short stories,
From the Four Winds, privately printed at his own expense.
23 March 1906 JG published
The Man of Property, the first novel in what became
The Forsyte Saga, which charts the career of Soames Forsyte. It was written with substantial assistance from his wife,
Ada Cooper Galsworthy.
25 May 1922 JG's three Forsyte novels were published together as
The Forsyte Saga, dedicated to his wife and unofficial collaborator,
Ada Cooper Galsworthy.
12 July 1928 JG published his last Forsyte novel,
Swan Song. London newspapers made the death of his best-known character, Soames Forsyte, front-page news.
31 January 1933 JG, prolific novelist and dramatist, died of a stroke at his home in
Hampstead, London.
