Ralph Straus

Born in Manchester in 1882, Ralph Straus was an English novelist and biographer who was educated at Harrow and Cambridge. He wrote across several forms, but he is especially remembered for literary biography and for making well-known figures feel vivid and approachable on the page.

Among his best-known books are Dickens: A Portrait in Pencil (1928) and Dickens: The Man and the Book (1936), which helped establish his reputation as a writer interested in the lives behind great literature. Reference sources also describe him as both a novelist and a biographer, reflecting the range of his career.

Straus died in 1950. Though not as widely known today as some of the figures he wrote about, his books remain part of the long tradition of popular literary biography in Britain.