R. F. Delderfield

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Ronald Frederick Delderfield (February 12, 1912 - June 24, 1972) was a popular English novelist and dramatist, many of whose works have been adapted for television and are still widely read.

Born in London, Delderfield moved with his family to Devon in his teens, when his father became editor of the Exmouth Chronicle, a local newspaper in Exmouth. In 1929, Delderfield joined the staff of the paper and later succeeded his father as editor. His first play was produced in 1936. Following service in the RAF during World War II, he resumed his literary career, while also running an antiques business near Budleigh Salterton, Devon. Having begun with drama, Delderfield decided to switch to writing novels in the 1950s. His first novel, Seven Men of Gascony, was published in 1949.

Several of Delderfield's historical novels and series involve young men who return from war and lead lives in England that allow the author to portray the sweep of English history. For example, David Powlett-Jones of To Serve Them All My Days begins his teaching of history at a rural public school shortly after being released from a shell shock ward in 1918. That novel examines the changes in private education and the development of the Labour political movement between the world wars. Adam Swann of the God is an Englishman series is a veteran of the British Army in India who forms a transport business in the mid-19th century, and thus those books explore the economic history of England through the First World War. In the A Horseman Riding By trilogy, Paul Craddock, also an ex-soldier, becomes a rural landlord in Delderfield's own Devon in the early 20th century.

These three books delve deeply into social history of that area from the Edwardian era through the early 1960's. Finally, the two-volume work The Avenue, which follows the residents of a middle-class suburban road over a few decades, begins shortly after the end of World War I with the return of one resident, who finds that his wife has died in the Spanish Flu epidemic and left him with several children to care for.

Delderfield also published historical novels on the Napoleonic Wars and some isolated novels set in more contemporary periods. His prose style, though more than competent, tends to be straightforward and highly readable, and his social attitudes are fairly traditional, though his politics, as expressed via his characters, are progressive. In general, Delderfield's novels warmly celebrate English history, humanity, and liberalism while demonstrating little patience with entrenched class differences and snobbery. Delderfield was criticized for his very conventional views of women's social roles, as he himself pointed out in his 1972 autobiography, For My Own Amusement.

Delderfield's works include:

• All Over the Town (1947)
• Seven Men of Gascony (1949)
• The Adventures of Ben Gunn (1956)
• The Dreaming Suburb (1958) - (Avenue series)
• The Avenue Goes to War (1958) - (Avenue series)
• Mr. Sermon (1963)
• A Horseman Riding By (1966) (published in the USA as two novels, Long Summer Day and Post of Honor)
• The Green Gauntlet (sequel to A Horseman Riding By)
• Come Home, Charlie, and Face Them (1969)
• God is an Englishman (1970) - (Swann saga)
• Theirs was the Kingdom (1972) - (Swann saga)
• For My Own Amusement (1972) (autobiographical).
• To Serve Them All My Days (1972)
• Give Us This Day (novel) (1973) - (Swann saga)
• Diana (1979)