H.E. Bates

As a schoolboy H.E. Bates 1905-74 decided to devote his life to writing, and at the age of twenty-one published his first novel. Thereafter he wrote steadily: short stories, novels, and journal articles on gardening and country matters. His collections of essays were illustrated by leading contemporary wood engravers such as Agnes Miller Parker and John Nash. During World War Two, as "Flying Officer X," H.E. Bates writings on the exploits of RAF pilots and other members of the Air Force were phenomenally successful in the UK and USA. The novel Fair Stood the Wind for France published in 1943, was an immediate success; and again in 1958 The Darling Buds of May the first of our novels about the Larkins family, was a bestseller. Peter Eads gives full details of first editions of all Bates work and adds comments from his autobiography and reviews. Short stories, poems, essays and articles are listed chronologically, with full details of the journals and collections in which they were published.