The Author's Craft

Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English novelist, playwright, and journalist, whose novels and plays generally reflected middle-class life in north Staffordshire. He was born in Hanley, Staffordshire (which is now Stoke-on-Trent), the son of a solicitor. He was educated in Newcastle-under-Lyme. After school, he worked for his father, and in his spare time he was a journalist. At age twenty-one, he moved to London to work as a solicitor's clerk. In 1889 he won a writing competition in Tit-Bits magazine and decided to become a full-time journalist. In 1894, he became assistant editor of the periodical Woman, for which he also began writing serial fiction. His first novel, A Man from the North, was published in 1898, the same year he became the editor of Woman. In 1900 he left the magazine and moved to Hockliffe, Bedfordshire, to become a full-time writer. In 1903 he moved to join the artist community in Paris, where he wrote several novels and plays. In 1908 he published The Old Wives' Tale, which was a best-seller. He visited to America in 1911 on a much-publicized trip. His excellent detective fiction includes The Loot of Cities (1905), six stories about Cecil Thorold, a rogue-detective millionaire "in search of joy' and not above blackmail and theft to corral his criminals. [Leslie S. Klinger, In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes (2011)] During World War I he was Director of Propaganda for France at the Ministry of Information. He refused a knighthood in 1918. In 1922 he separated from his French wife and fell in love with the actress Dorothy Cheston, with whom he stayed for the rest of his life. He died of typhoid at his home in London in 1931.