Arnold Bennett

Arnold Bennett was born in 1867 in Hanley, one of the six pottery-manufacturing towns in Staffordshire that he would immortalize as the "Five Towns" in his fiction. The son of a self-made solicitor, he left the Potteries for London at twenty-one to pursue a literary career, working first as a solicitor's clerk and then as a journalist before devoting himself to fiction. He lived in Paris for nearly a decade, where his immersion in French realist fiction—particularly Flaubert, Maupassant, and the Goncourt brothers—shaped his literary method. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by The Old Wives' Tale.