These essays, lectures, memoirs, and broadcasts are the thought-provoking products of Forsters engagement with the literary, political, and social events of his time.

This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies

From the literary icon, author of Howard’s End and A Passage to India, comes a posthumous collection of short works, many never before published. Featuring fourteen short stories, The Life to Come spans six decades of E. M. Forster’s literary career, tracking every phase of his development. Never having sought publication for most of the stories—only two were published in his lifetime—Forster worried his career would suffer because of their overtly homosexual themes. Instead they were shown to an appreciative circle of friends and fellow writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, and T. E. Lawrence. With stories that are lively and amusing (“What Does It Matter?”; “The Obelisk”), and others that are more somber and thought-provoking (“Dr Woolacott”; “Arthur Snatchfold”), The Life to Come sheds a light on Forster’s powerful but suppressed explorations beyond the strictures of conventional society. “Have we been as ready for Forster’s honesty as we thought we were? His greatness surely had root in his capacity to treat all human relationships seriously and truthfully. . . . Even the earliest and most ephemeral of them will be recognized as the frailer embodiments of the same passionate convictions that made for the moral iron of his novels.” —Eudora Welty, The New York Times Book Review

Part of the Critical Assessments of Writers in English series, the aim of which is to provide complete collections of previously published, formative critical assessments covering the whole work of individual writers. The titles should be useful to serious readers of literature, researchers and advanced students.