Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, Volume Two 1921-1970 (Volume II)
by Edward Morgan Forster
Category: Biography & Autobiography

The letters of the last half of E. M. Forster's life are as engaging as those of his earlier years. Imbued with the same wit, warmth, and vitality, they reveal the breadth of his interests and the great range and enduring quality of his friendships. After a second trip to India in 1921, Forster finally finished the Indian novel he had begun years before. A Passage to India (1924) capped his career as a novelist; he then turned his energies to essays and other nonfictional prose. In the 1930s he emerged as an active journalist, writing and broadcasting on social and political issues. He fought for civil liberties and led a successful campaign against the BBC's political blacklisting of performers. His correspondents during these years included T. S. Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon, Lennard and Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender. At seventy Forster began along, happy, and productive new period in his life with his work on the libretto for Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd. In 1960 he was a leading defense witness in the Lady Chatterley trial. By then he was a revered figure among literati and enjoyed advising younger writers. In these last decades he divided his time between his rooms at King's College, Cambridge, and the home of his friends the Buckinghams in Coventry, where he died at age ninety-one.