E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster was an English novelist and essayist whose work examined the barriers of class, nationality, and convention that prevent human connection. His five novels — including A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924) — are distinguished by their formal elegance and their insistence on the importance of personal relationships over social propriety. He lived to ninety-one but published no fiction after 1924; his homosexual novel Maurice appeared posthumously in 1971.