E.M. Forster was born in 1879 and died in 1970.He was on friendly terms with the Bloomsbury Group, which also included Virginia Woolf.

In the period when Forster wrote Howards End, 1908 to 1910, he was already decrying the filthy, cluttered underside of life in the motorized age. Although he was not alone in despising the stink of gasoline and the frantic pace of vehicles, Forster had an unusual grasp of how technological advance promised to change social interaction often for the worse. Howards End is a book about human connection.

After the success of Howards End in 1910, he feared his creativity had dried up. Yet in 1913, the idea for a novel about homosexual love came to him in a moment of revelation. That seemed to show a way out of his barren time, and he wrote Maurice enthusiastically and at great speed. When it was done in 1914, however, Forster saw that it could not appear "until my death or England's," and it remained unpublished until after he died.

Forster could break free of his unproductive period to complete A Passage to India in 1924.

A Room With A View (1908) ends happily, but that is perhaps because the stretch for a connection is not as far.

Maurice and short stories in the collection The Life to Come were published posthumously. "The Other Boat" is a particularly powerful short story in The Life to Come. He also wrote A Room With A View (1908) and Where Angels Fear To Tread.