35 Facts About EM Forster

Edward Morgan Forster was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India.

EM Forster wrote numerous short stories, essays, speeches and broadcasts, as well as a limited number of biographies and some pageant plays.

EM Forster then travelled throughout Europe before publishing his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, in 1905.

EM Forster was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 20 separate years.

EM Forster, born at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, which no longer stands, was the only child of the Anglo-Irish Alice Clara "Lily" and a Welsh architect, Edward Morgan Llewellyn EM Forster.

EM Forster was registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but accidentally baptised Edward Morgan Forster.

EM Forster's father died of tuberculosis on 30 October 1880 before Forster's second birthday.

EM Forster had fond memories of his childhood at Rooks Nest.

EM Forster attended as a day boy Tonbridge School in Kent, where the school theatre has been named in his honour, although he is known to have been unhappy there.

Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which EM Forster was a member in the 1910s and 1920s.

EM Forster graduated with a BA with second-class honours in both classics and history.

In 1904, EM Forster travelled in Greece and Italy out of interest in their classical heritage.

EM Forster then sought a post in Germany, to learn the language, and spent several months in the summer of 1905 in Nassenheide, Pomerania, as a tutor to the children of the writer Elizabeth von Arnim.

EM Forster wrote a short memoir of this experience, which was one of the happiest times in his life.

In 1906 EM Forster fell in love with Syed Ross Masood, a 17-year-old Indian future Oxford student he tutored in Latin.

EM Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as private secretary to Tukojirao III, Maharajah of Dewas.

EM Forster edited the letters of Eliza Fay from India, in an edition first published in 1925.

EM Forster was open about his homosexuality to close friends, but not to the public.

EM Forster never married, but had a number of male lovers during his adult life.

EM Forster developed long-term relations with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman.

EM Forster was a close friend of the socialist poet and philosopher Edward Carpenter.

In 1960, EM Forster began a relationship with the Bulgarian emigre Mattei Radev, a picture framer and art collector who moved in Bloomsbury group circles.

From 1925 until his mother's death at age 90 in March 1945, EM Forster lived with her at the house West Hackhurst in the village of Abinger Hammer, Surrey, finally leaving in September 1946.

EM Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College in January 1946, and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little.

EM Forster declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1953.

EM Forster died of a stroke on 7 June 1970 at the age of 91, at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry, Warwickshire.

EM Forster's ashes, mingled with those of Buckingham, were later scattered in the rose garden of Coventry's crematorium, near Warwick University.

EM Forster discussed that work ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel.

George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced EM Forster, including Samuel Butler.

EM Forster connects personal relations with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves.

EM Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in a preface to its Everyman's Library Edition.

The novel was controversial, given that EM Forster's homosexuality had not been known or widely acknowledged.

Early in his career, EM Forster attempted a historical novel about the Byzantine scholar Gemistus Pletho and the Italian condottiero Sigismondo de Malatesta, but was dissatisfied with the result and never published it, though he kept the manuscript and later showed it to Naomi Mitchison.

EM Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from 1963 until his death.

EM Forster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised for his attachment to mysticism.