John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy was born in 1867 into a wealthy lawyer's family in Surrey and was educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford, where he read law; he was called to the bar but had no interest in the law. His father sent him on long voyages to study shipping, and on a ship homeward bound from Australia he met Joseph Conrad, then the first mate, beginning a lifelong friendship. Later, encouraged by Ada, the woman he loved and afterwards married, he began to write. In The Forsyte Saga he portrayed the rise and decline of several generations of the English upper middle class, and he also wrote many plays on social questions that helped bring about the reform of the English prison system. In 1932 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he died in London the following year.