John Galsworthy: 237 books

John Galsworthy alcanzó la fama con la publicación en 1906 de la novela "El propietario", que dieciséis años más tarde se convertiría en la primera de las que componen "La saga de los Forsyte". "El propietario" arranca en su primer capítulo con un importante brío...

This 1910 collection of stories, studies, and impressions includes one of Galsworthy's most notable short works, "The Japanese Quince."  A contemporary review in the New York Times praised the stories as "vivified by a passionate sympathy with life in its every manifestation."

Subtitled "A Comedy in Three Acts for Idealists and Others," this 1922 drama, set in the post-World War I era, was the third in Galsworthy's Fifth Series of plays. Taking place in the home of Geoffrey March, the action occurs on a Thursday, when the window cleaner discusses his daughter’s misfortune with the family and the play continues the following fortnight when the cleaner returns.

This 1919 collection of Galsworthy’s poems is true to its title, splitting into three sections: moods, songs, and doggerels. The volume contains over fifty poems, including “A Dream,” “On a Soldier’s Funeral,” “Devon to Me!,” “When Love if Young,” “To My God,” “Life?,” and many others.

This 1920 play by Galsworthy—made into a 1931 film by Alfred Hitchcock—features a collision between two families:  the "old-money" Hillcrists and the nouveau-riche Hornblowers.  As the patriarchs of the two families squabble over a piece of land, an innocent young woman will pay the price.

The Forsyte Saga is Galsworthy’s trilogy about the eponymous family and connected lives. These books, as with many of his other works, deal with social class, upper-middle class lives in particular. Although sympathetic to his characters, he highlights their insular, snobbish, and acquisitive attitudes...

In this 1910 play, Galsworthy sought to highlight injustices in the British prison system, especially the use of solitary confinement and other cruel and arbitrary punishments.  The immense popularity of the play helped secure significant reforms.

Galsworthy manages to paint the whole picture before the mind's eye through his beautiful imagery and rich language. In this collection he has skilfully combined different themes. The characters are drawn concisely; even without great details the themes are masterfully related. Engrossing!

In the novel Saint's Progress, published in 1919, Galsworthy wrestles with issues of the Great War.  What was really being fought for:  love as the guiding principle of life, a balance between Might is Right and Right is Might or a basic belief in God?   

This 1916 collection includes such topics as "On Prisons and Punishment" and "On the Position of Women."  In his Author's Note, Galsworthy defended his pleas for reform:  "The war will not last for ever, and in the peace that follows life will be rougher, [and] the need for those pleas more insistent even than it was."

In its review of this 1911 novel about conflicts arising from the rigid class prejudices of upper-caste English society, the New York Times singled out Galsworthy's heroine for special praise, calling her "at once splendid, simple, crowned with happiness, and somehow caged and tragically looking out between gilded bars." 

This 1913 novel traces the history of one man, Mark Lennan, from his eighteenth year through his forty-eighth.  But Galsworthy's real focus is the women in Mark's life. Each phase of his adulthood focuses on a women – his mother, then wife, then daughter, represented by “Spring,” “Summer,”...

«Contado por el maestro» relata la peripecia de un bravo e impetuoso joven que se alista en el ejército británico obedeciendo al llamamiento de Horatio Kitchener en los primeros días de agosto de 1914, nada más estallar la guerra. Lo hace siendo menor de edad y no será ésa la única decisión...

When Edward J. O'Brien asked me to cooperate with him in choosing each year's best English short stories, to be published as a companion volume to his annual selection of the best American short stories, I had not realized that at the end of my arduous task, which has involved the reading of many hundreds...