Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet, born on 2 June 1840 in Dorchester, in the southwest of England, and he died on 11 January 1928. Trained as an architect, he turned to writing and set most of his fiction in Wessex, an imagined version of the rural counties he knew from childhood. His novels follow farmers, labourers, and small-town people whose lives are shaped by chance, class, and the pressure of social convention. They are known for vivid landscapes and a strong sense of fate. After the harsh public reaction to Jude the Obscure in 1895, he gave up novels and concentrated on poetry, publishing several collections and a long verse drama about the Napoleonic wars. He matters for his compassion toward ordinary people, his clear-eyed view of a changing countryside, and the lasting influence of both his prose and his poems.