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Thomas Hardy

THOMAS HARDY, probably the most searching and profound novelist of our time, was born June 2, 1840, in Dorsetshire, England. He died on January 11, 1928. In his youth he read much and cherished the dream of becoming a poet, but he studied and practised architecture as assistant to a London architect, winning a prize for design. The fine proportion and solidity of structure in his novels were probably somewhat due to his architectural training. For five years he assiduously practised writing poetry, but when he was twenty-seven he turned definitely to fiction. His first story was accepted two years later, but upon the advice of George Meredith he decided not to publish it. His first novel, "Desperate Remedies," appeared in 1871. During the next twenty-five years he published fourteen novels and two volumes of short stories. "Under the Greenwood Tree" (1872) he "never surpassed in happy and delicate perfection of art." In this and his next novel, "A pair of Blue Eyes" (1873), begins to show itself that strain of deep irony which is so potent throughout Hardy's writings. "Far from the Madding Crowd" (1874) was his first popular success. In it is revealed Hardy's superb power of depicting nature as symbolic background for his characters, an organic part of the action of his story. This was the earliest of what he called his novels of character and environment, which included "The Return of the Native," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," his masterpiece, and "Jude the Obscure." Not until he was fifty-eight years old was his first volume of verse published, and he was sixty-four when the first part of his stupendous epic poem, "The Dynasts," startled the literary world.