1. Thomas Hardy

2. His Life
June 2, 1840 – January 11, 1928
Novelist, Poet, Short Story Writer
Literary style: Naturalist

3. Hardy had an unusual literary career: he began and ended his career as a poet, but was one of England’s premier novelists in between

4. His father was a stonemason and a carpenter and he taught Thomas to play the violin
Hardy was apprenticed to an architect, and he also read voraciously on his own
After he began working in London, he wrote stories and poems in his free time
He tried unsuccessfully to publish his poems

5. After Hardy moved to London he began writing novels
He published several and was able to stop working as an architect
His true literary love was poetry: he said he would have never written a single novel if his poetry had sold well
He lived a full life and was buried in the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey

6. His Work His novels had a new twist over other writers of the time
They were melancholy, and had characters who were tragic because of their own problems…nature defeated them because of their own weaknesses
After several were poorly received, Hardy decided to go back to writing poetry
He invented the “cliffhanger,” leaving a hero literally on a cliff at the end of a section in a serial novel

7. Hardy’s poems are praised by twentieth-century critics for their simple, compressed forms and their sad, ironic tones

8. Many of his novels are written in a pastoral form – natural, simple folk living in the country and living off of the land
His work bridges the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and is often seen as modernist