John Galsworthy

Born to a wealthy London legal family, Galsworthy was called to the bar and never practiced; sent to sea to study maritime law instead, he befriended the first mate of the Torrens, Joseph Conrad, then an unpublished sailor with a manuscript. A ten-year secret affair with Ada, his cousin's unhappy wife, whom he finally married in 1905, gave him the wound at the saga's heart: the marriage of Soames and Irene, possession mistaken for love.

The Man of Property (1906) opened the Forsyte chronicle he completed as The Forsyte Saga in 1922, an immense success on both sides of the Atlantic; his reformist plays, Justice above all, moved actual legislation on solitary confinement.

Founding president of PEN, he refused a knighthood, accepted the Order of Merit, gave the Nobel money to the writers' organization, and died weeks after the 1932 prize was announced.