A. E. Coppard

Alfred Edgar Coppard (4 January 1878 – 13 January 1957) was an English writer, noted for his influence on the short story form, and poet.

Life

Coppard was born the son of a tailor and a housemaid in Folkestone, and had little formal education.[1] Coppard grew up in difficult, poverty-stricken circumstances; he later described his childhood as "shockingly poor" and Frank O'Connor described Coppard's early life as "cruel".[2] He left school at the age of nine to work as an errand boy for a Jewish trouser maker in Whitechapel during the period of the Jack the Ripper murders.

In the early 1920s, and still unpublished, he was in Oxford and a leading light of a literary group, the New Elizabethans, who met in a pub to read Elizabethan drama. W. B. Yeats sometimes attended the meetings. At this period he met Richard Hughes[3] and Edgell Rickword, amongst others.

Coppard was a member of the Independent Labour Party for a period.[4] Coppard's fiction was influenced by Thomas Hardy and on its initial publication, favourably compared to that of H. E. Bates.[5] Coppard's short stories were praised by Ford Madox Ford and Frank O'Connor.[2] Coppard's work enjoyed a surge in popularity in the US after his Selected Tales was chosen as a selection by the Book of the Month Club.[2]

In the profile in Twentieth Century Authors, Coppard lists Abraham Lincoln as the politician he most admired.[6] Coppard also listed Sterne, Dickens, James, Hardy, Shaw, Chekhov and Joyce as authors he valued;[6] conversely, he expressed a dislike for the works of D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and Rudyard Kipling.[6]

Some of Coppard's collections, such as Adam and Eve and Pinch Me and Fearful Pleasures, contain stories with fantastic elements, either of supernatural horror or allegorical fantasy.[7] Stableford argues Coppard's fantasy has a similar style to that of Walter de la Mare and that "many of his mercurial and oddly plaintive fantasies are deeply disturbing".[5]

In Nancy Cunard's 1937 book Authors take Sides on the Spanish War, Coppard took the side of the Republicans.[8]

A.E. Coppard was the uncle of George Coppard, a British soldier who served with the Machine Gun Corps during World War I, known for his memoirs With A Machine Gun to Cambrai.[9]

Works

Story collections

Poetry collections

Chapbooks

Non-Fiction

As Editor

Contributor

(Coppard was one of the contributors to this book; the others were Seán O'Faoláin, Elizabeth Bowen, John Van Druten, Gladys Bronwyn Stern, Ronald Fraser, Malachi Whitaker, Norah Hoult and Hamish Maclaren )

Autobiography

Further reading

References

Notes

  1. ↑ This is Folkestone
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Coppard, Alfred Edgar" by Thomas Moult and Clare Hansen. Dictionary of National Biography,Volume 13, edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 019861411X (pp. 360-61).
  3. ↑ Richard Perceval Graves, Richard Hughes (1994), p. 52.
  4. ↑ A. E. Coppard, It's Me, Oh Lord! Methuen, 1957, (p.148-9)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Coppard, A(lfred) E(dgar)" by Brian Stableford in David Pringle, St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers. London : St. James Press, 1998, ISBN 1558622063 (pp. 147-8).
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Twentieth century authors, a biographical dictionary of modern literature, edited by Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft; (Third Edition). New York, The H.W. Wilson Company, 1950 (p.312-312)
  7. ↑ "Coppard, A.E.", in Brian Stableford, The A to Z of Fantasy Literature. Scarecrow Press, 2005 (p.89).
  8. ↑ Katharine Bail Hoskins, Today the Struggle: Literature and Politics in England during the Spanish Civil War. University of Texas Press, 1969 (p.18)
  9. ↑ George Coppard, With A Machine Gun to Cambrai, (1969), p. 16.

External links