author
d. 1960
A little-known British novelist with a taste for wit and fantasy, remembered today for the satirical novel The King Who Went on Strike. His work has the feel of an offbeat literary curiosity from the interwar years.

by Pearson Choate
Born Robert Pearson Choate in Ormskirk, Lancashire, in 1886, he was a British writer whose surviving reputation rests mainly on a small body of fiction from the early 20th century. Reference sources identify him as having died in Worthing, Sussex, in 1960.
Choate is best known for The King Who Went on Strike (1924), a comic fantasy about a monarch rebelling against the demands of kingship. Contemporary and later listings also connect him with Men Limited: An Impertinence and the 1933 novel Motley and Mr. Pinch, suggesting a writer drawn to playful, satirical storytelling rather than large-scale literary fame.
Very little biographical detail appears to be widely preserved, which gives his books an added air of rediscovery. For modern readers, that obscurity is part of the appeal: Choate feels like one of those almost-forgotten authors who left behind a few distinctive, quirky works waiting to be stumbled upon again.