John Galsworthy Books In Order

Publication Order of The Forsyte Saga Books

Publication Order of End of the Chapter Books

Publication Order of A Modern Comedy Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Plays

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy was born on August 14, 1867 in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, born at what’s now called Galsworthy House (at that time known as Parkhurst). He was the son of Blanche Bailey (nee Bartleet) and John Galsworthy. His family was well established and prosperous, with a large property.

John went to New College, Oxford, and Harrow. He took a Second in Law (Jurisprudentia) at Oxford in 1889, and then trained as a barrister and was called to the bar in the year 1890.

But he wasn’t keen to start practicing law and traveled abroad to look after the family’s trans-European shipping agency. It was during this time that he met Joseph Conrad in 1893, who was then the first mate of a sailing ship moored in the harbor of Adelaide, Australia, and these two future novelists quickly became close friends.

In 1897, he published his first book and first collection of short stories “From the Four Winds”. These and many subsequent works were published under his pen name of John Sinjohn, and it wasn’t until 1904’s “The Island Pharisees” that he started publishing under his real name, probably owing to his dad’s recent death.

In 1906, he published his first play, called “The Silver Box”, which quickly became a success, and he followed that up with “The Man of the Property”, which was the first book of a Forsyte trilogy. Even though he continued writing both novels and plays, it was his work as a playwright that he was primarily appreciated at the time. Along with other writers of the time period, like George Bernard Shaw, his plays addressed the class system as well as other social issues, two of the best known being “Strife” and “The Skin Game”.

While he’s sympathetic to his characters, he still highlights their snobbish, insular, and acquisitive attitudes as well as their suffocating moral codes. He’s one of the first Edwardian era authors that challenged some of the ideals of society as depicted in the preceding literature of Victorian England.

In 1895, he started an affair with Ada Nemesis Pearson Cooper, who was the wife of John’s cousin, Major Arthur Galsworthy. They married after her divorce was finalized on September 23, 1905 and remained together until he died.

Before they got married, they often stayed clandestinely in a farmhouse known as Wingstone which was in the village of Manaton on Dartmoor, Devon. In the year 1908, he took out a long lease on part of the building, and it wound up being their regular second home until the year 1923.

John, through his writings, campaigned for a variety of causes, which includes women’s rights, prison reform, and animal welfare, as well as campaigning against censorship. John was a supporter of British involvement in the Great War.

He opposed the slaughter of animals and fought for animal rights. He opposed hunting and was a supporter of the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports. John was also a humanitarian and was a member of the Humanitarian League.

In 1932, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, after he was nominated by Henrik Schuck, and John donated the money from his Nobel to PEN International. He was too ill to attend the ceremony held on December 10, 1932.

John’s sister, Lilian, was married to Georg Sauter, a German painter and lithographer from 1894. Their son, Rudolf, was also a graphic artist and painter, who among other things, illustrated his uncle’s work.

The last seven years of his life he lived at Bury, West Sussex. He died from a brain tumor on January 31, 1933 at the age of 65 in Hampstead, London at his home at Grove Lodge in Hampstead. The popularity of his stories declined subsequent to his death, until the highly popular television adaptation of “The Forsyte Saga” in 1967 increased public interest in his work.

“The Forsyte Saga” has been filmed several other times. Once in 1949 where Errol Flynn played a rare villainous role as Soames, in a version directed by Compton Bennett for MGM. And again in 2002, in a version directed by Christopher Menaul, which starred Gina McKee, Rupert Graves, Damian Lewis, and Corin Redgrave.

“The White Monkey” was adapted into a silent film in 1925, while “The Skin Game” was adapted and directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1931, which starred Helen Haye, C.V. France, Jill Esmund, and Edmund Gwenn. “Escape” was adapted twice, once in 1930 and 1948, with Joseph L. Mankiewicz directing the latter which starred Rex Harrison, Peggy Cummins, and William Hartnell. “One More River” (based off “Over the River”) was filmed in 1934 by James Whale. It starred Collin Clive, Frank Lawton, and Diana Wynnyard, and it featured Mrs. Patrick Campbell in a rare appearance in a talkie.

John’s “The Apple Tree” short story was adapted into a radio play for Orson Welles’ “Lady Esther Almanac” radio series on CBS, which was first broadcast on January 12, 1942. And the 1988 film called “A Summer Story” was also based off “The Apple Tree”.

The nine books which make up “The Forsyte Chronicles”, one of the most enduring and popular works of 20th century literature, chronicle the ebbing social power of the commercial upper middle class Forsyte family between 1886 and 1920. His masterful narrative not only examines their fortunes but also the wider developments within society, especially women’s changing position. John has drawn an accurately detailed and fascinating picture of the British propertied class.

The series, often incorrectly called “The Forsyte Saga”, the nine novel sequence which is properly known as “The Forsyte Chronicles” is made up of three trilogies, of which the first trilogy is “The Forsyte Saga”, while the second trilogy is “A Modern Comedy”, and is followed by the “End of the Chapter”, the third and final trilogy.

He devoted virtually all of his professional career to creating a fictional yet wholly representative family of propertied Victorians with the Forsytes. He made their lives and times, fortunes and deaths, losses and loves so very real that readers accused him of including as characters in his drama some real individuals whom they actually knew.