Frank Arthur Swinnerton

Frank Arthur Swinnerton (12 August 1884 – 6 November 1982) was an English novelist, critic, biographer and essayist.

He was the author of more than 50 books, and as a publisher's editor helped other writers including Aldous Huxley and Lytton Strachey. His long life and career in publishing made him one of the last links with the generation of writers that included H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett.

Biography Swinnerton was born in Wood Green, a suburb of London, the son of Charles Swinnerton, a copperplate engraver, and Rose, née Cottam.

Career Swinnerton left school at the age of 14 and was employed as an office boy for a newspaper publisher, Hay, Nisbet & Co He moved on to the publishing house of Chatto & Windus, first as a proof-reader and then as an editor. Although he began writing novels in 1909, he continued editing until he became a full-time author in 1926.

As a novelist, Swinnerton achieved critical and commercial success with Nocturne in 1917, and remained a successful writer for the rest of his life. His last novel, Some Achieve Greatness (1976), was published when he was in his early nineties. Some critics detected echoes of George Gissing and Arnold Bennett in Swinnerton's work, but he himself thought his chief influences were Henry James, Henrik Ibsen and Louisa May Alcott.