A. E. Coppard
Alfred Edgar Coppard (4 January 187813 January 1957) was an English writer and poet, noted for his influence on the short story form. Life. Coppard was born the son of a tailor and a housemaid in Folkestone, and had little formal education. Coppard grew up in difficult, poverty-stricken circumstances; he later described his childhood as "shockingly poor" and Frank O'Connor described Coppard's early life as "cruel". He left school at the age of nine to work as an errand boy for a Jewish trouser maker in Whitechapel during the period of the Jack the Ripper  murders. In the early 1920s, and still unpublished, he was in Oxford and a leading light of a literary group, the "New Elizabethans", who met in a pub to read Elizabethan drama. W. B. Yeats sometimes attended the meetings. At this period he met Richard Hughes and Edgell Rickword, amongst others. Coppard was a member of the Independent Labour Party for a period. Coppard's fiction was influenced by Thomas Hardy and, on its initial publication, favourably compared to that of H. E. Bates. Coppard's work enjoyed a surge in popularity in the United States after his "Selected Tales  was chosen as a selection by the Book of the Month Club. In the profile in Twentieth Century Authors", Coppard lists Abraham Lincoln as the politician he most admired. Coppard also listed Sterne, Dickens, James, Hardy, Shaw, Chekhov and Joyce as authors he valued; conversely, he expressed a dislike for the works of D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and Rudyard Kipling. Some of Coppard's collections, such as "Adam and Eve and Pinch Me" and "Fearful Pleasures", contain stories with fantastic elements, either of supernatural horror or allegorical fantasy. In Nancy Cunard's 1937 book "Authors take Sides on  the Spanish War", Coppard took the side of the Republicans. A.E. Coppard was the uncle of George Coppard, a British soldier who served with the Machine Gun Corps during World War I, known for his memoirs "With A Machine Gun to Cambrai." Critical reception. Coppard's short stories were praised by Ford Madox Ford and Frank O'Connor. Coppard's book "Nixey's Harlequin" received good reviews from L. A. G. Strong, Gerald Bullett, and "The Times Literary Supplement" (which praised Coppard's "brilliant virtuosity as a pure spinner of tales"). Coppard's supernatural fiction was admired by Algernon Blackwood. Brian  Stableford argues that Coppard's fantasy has a similar style to that of Walter de la Mare and that "many of his mercurial and oddly plaintive fantasies are deeply disturbing". (Coppard was one of the contributors to this book; the others were Seán Ó Faoláin, Elizabeth Bowen, Works. Contributor. John Van Druten, Gladys Bronwyn Stern, Ronald Fraser, Malachi Whitaker, Norah Hoult and Hamish Maclaren.)