Thomas Hardy

Born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, on June 2, 1840, he grew up in the countryside that would later shape the landscapes of his fiction. Before becoming famous as a writer, he trained and worked as an architect, including time in London, and his deep knowledge of place helped give his novels their strong sense of setting.

He is especially associated with Wessex, the partly real, partly imagined region of southwest England that frames books such as Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. His fiction often looks closely at class, love, chance, and the social rules that can trap people, which gives even his best-known stories a lasting modern feel.

After the controversy surrounding his later novels, he turned mainly to poetry and spent the rest of his long career writing verse. He died on January 11, 1928, and remains one of the rare writers celebrated as both a major novelist and a major poet in English literature.