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 Clayhanger 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.