ISBN The Longest Journey

The Longest Journey

E. M. Forster once described The Longest Journey as the book “I am most glad to have written.” An introspective novel of manners at once comic and tragic, it tells of a sensitive and intelligent young man with an intense imagination and a certain amount of literary talent. He sets out full of hope to become a writer, but gives up his aspirations for those of the conventional world, gradually sinking into a life of petty conformity and bitter disappointments.

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About author(s)
E. M. Forster (1879–1970) was born Edward Morgan Forster in London. He attended Tonbridge School as a day boy and went on to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1897. With King’s he had a lifelong connection and was elected to an Honorary Fellowship in 1946. Forster wrote six novels, four of which appeared before World War I: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard’s End (1910).
 
An interval of fourteen years elapsed before he published A Passage to India. It won both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Finished in 1914, his novel on homosexual themes, Maurice, was published in posthumously in 1971.
 
He also published two volumes of short stories; two collections of essays; a critical work, Aspects of the Novel; The Hill of Devi, a fascinating record of two visits Forster made to the Indian state of Dewas Senior; two biographies; two books about Alexandria (where he worked for the Red Cross during World War I); and, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd. The Times called him “one of the most esteemed English novelists of his time.”