H.E. Bates

H.E. Bates (born May 16, 1905, Rushden, Northamptonshire, England—died January 29, 1974, Canterbury, Kent) was an English novelist and short-story writer of high reputation and wide popularity.

Bates attended grammar school at Kettering; he qualified for university but did not attend because his family could not afford it. In 1921, at age 16, he joined the Northampton Chronicle as a reporter, but he left two months later because he did not like the work. He was next a clerk in a factory in Rushden, a job he held for two years. He began writing his first novel, The Two Sisters, at this time, and he was fired when his employer discovered that he was writing it while at his job. Bates continued working on the novel, and, after multiple rejections, it was published in 1926. A collection of short stories, Day’s End, and Other Stories, was released in 1928. These early short stories and novels were praised, but he became well known as a writer about the countryside and the life of the agricultural labourer with The Poacher (1935); A House of Women (1936); My Uncle Silas (1940), widely enjoyed for its earthy, Rabelaisian humour; and The Beauty of the Dead, and Other Stories (1941). He had acquired his knowledge of, and appreciation for, rural English life from his father and grandfather while growing up in the Midlands.

World War II made Bates famous. Commissioned as a writer for the Royal Air Force in 1941, as “Flying Officer X” he gained great popularity with The Greatest People in the World (1942) and How Sleep the Brave (1943), collections of stories that conveyed the feel of flying in wartime. Three novels published under his own name—Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), about a British bomber crew forced down in occupied France, and two set in Burma (Myanmar) during the Japanese invasion, The Purple Plain (1946) and The Jacaranda Tree (1948)—earned Bates a new reputation as a novelist of power.

In his postwar novels and stories Bates reached the height of his powers. From The Nature of Love (1954) to A Moment in Time (1964) and The Triple Echo (1970), he developed consistently in subtlety, depth, and strength as a novelist, and in The Darling Buds of May (1958) he created a realistic, lovable farm family, the Larkins. Colonel Julian (1955) demonstrates his range in the short story, and the autobiographical The Vanished World (1969) and The Blossoming World (1971) show that he retained his power to capture the mood of the passing moment.