“His stories are a highly evocative delight.” – Oxford Times

A.E. Coppard’s short stories establish him as the last great writer of the English countryside, as well as one of England’s finest writers of short stories.

Alfred Edgar Coppard was born in Folkestone in 1878, the son of a radical tailor and a housemaid. He grew up in poverty and his education ended at the age of nine when his father died and he started work to support his family (first as an errand boy in Whitechapel in the East End). Among his many jobs, Coppard sold paraffin and cheese, was a messenger for Reuters and as a teenager he became a professional sprinter.

He eventually rose to the position of clerk and in 1907 he moved to Oxford where he worked in the Eagle Ironworks, and was the secretary of the local branch of the Independent Labour Party. Living in Oxford allowed him to become a member of a group called the New Elizabethans alongside W.B. Yeats and he also met young students, such as Aldous Huxley. Coppard saved enough money (supplemented by prize money he won as an athlete) to leave his job and rent a cottage in rural Oxfordshire where he was determined to remain until he was recognised as a writer. He moved to Shepards Pit, in 1919, into a remote cottage that had no sanitation and survived mainly on raw vegetables, but it gave him the freedom he needed to focus on his writing.

Coppard’s first collection of short stories, Adam & Eve & Pinch Me was published in 1921. The collection became a critical success and was reprinted several times. By 1925 he was established as one of the major fiction writers of the time, his contemporaries regarded him as a seminal figure in making the short story a unique literary form. Ford Madox Ford published his most famous story, The Higgler, in The Transatlantic Review.

A.E. Coppard was a lifelong socialist, and atheist, and after WWII he was a prominent supporter of the peace movement. The Collected Tales of A.E. Coppard was published in 1948 in the United States and became a major bestseller in 1951 when it was promoted in the Book-of-the-Month Club. This provided Coppard with the largest income of his career, he donated much of it to socialist causes. A.E. Coppard died in 1957.