Edwin Pugh

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Portrait of Edwin Pugh EDWIN PUGH.JPG
Portrait of Edwin Pugh

Edwin William Pugh (1874 - 5 February 1930) was an English writer. He published 33 books, primarily novels and short story collections, and focused on working-class "cockney school" storylines.

Contents

The Modernist Journals Project finds that "Pugh's fiction largely goes unread today, and those critics who have read him generally accuse him of sentimentality and melodrama." [1] He also wrote literary criticism praising the works of Charles Dickens. [2]

Life

Pugh was born at 47, Foley Street, Marylebone, London, the second of four children of David Walter Pugh (1843-1887), a theatrical property maker and player with the Covent Garden orchestra. [3] After positive reviews of his first two books, A Street in Suburbia (1895) (a collection of short stories, published when he was 21 years old) [4] and The Man of Straw (1896), Pugh left his job as a clerk to write full-time. [1] After a few years of good fortune, however, Pugh's working class output lost favor, and he struggled with poverty for the rest of his life. [5] He died in London on 5 February 1930. [6]

Bibliography

Works published by Pugh include: [7]

See also

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References

  1. 1 2 Edwin William Pugh (1874-1930), Modernist Journals Project (Retrieved 8 August 2012)
  2. Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, p. 514 (1989)
  3. Atkinson, Damian (2004). "Pugh, Edwin William (1874–1930), novelist, short-story writer, and critic" . Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/56887. ISBN   978-0-19-861412-8.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  4. Advertising for A Street in Suburbia (1897)
  5. Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street, p. 235-37 (1985)
  6. (6 February 1930). Edwin Pugh, Novelist, Dies in London at 56: Author of Many Volumes Worked in a City Office Before He Took Up Writing, The New York Times
  7. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Vol. 4 (1900-1950), p. 718 (1972)