Arnold Bennett born 1867-1931

About:

Enoch Arnold Bennett was born in the town of Hanley in Staffordshire, one of the five Potteries towns that joined themselves together at the beginning of the last century to form Stoke-on-Trent. He began his working life in Stoke as a rent collector. But at the age of 21 he moved to London and shortly afterwards won a literary competition in the magazine Titbits and became a journalist. Working as the assistant editor on the periodical Woman he discovered it was difficult to find decent writing for the magazine so he wrote some for it himself. It was an immediate hit and his next endeavour became the hugely successful Grand Hotel Babylon.

He then devoted himself entirely to writing and began the series of novels wryly describing life in the Potteries towns in which he had grown up. In 1903 he moved to Paris where he married and continued to write prolifically becoming the most acclaimed British writer in America since Dickens. Bennett’s great distinction at that time was that he believed the stories of ordinary people had the potential to be the subject of interesting books, much akin to the French writer Maupassant, whose influence on his work Bennett acknowledged.

Surprisingly, he also wrote one of the first in the genre that became the self-help book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, it was vastly popular in its time and remains widely read today.

He returned to Britain just before the Great War and became the Director of Propaganda for the War Ministry when war broke out. After the Armistice in 1918 he was offered a Knighthood for his services, but refused, still smarting at the length of time it had taken the British literary establishment to recognise his work, in spite of his huge international reputation. In 1926 he began writing a weekly article on books for Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard newspaper.

He died in 1931 from Typhus and his ashes were returned to the Potteries and buried in Burslem Cemetery.