Coppard, Alfred Edgar

(1878-1957)

   The son of a poor tailor, he lived in Folkestone, Kent, and Brighton, Sussex. Detesting injustice and cruelty, he became prominent in the peace movement. By 1907 he was clerk in the Eagle Ironworks at Oxford, which he left in 1919 to become a fulltime writer, supplementing his income by prize money from his athletic prowess. He was greatly encouraged when an American periodical paid him fifty pounds for a story of a few thousand words. Between his 1921 short story Adam and Eve and Pinch Me and his 2001 Short Stories, he published twenty-eight books of short stories or poems. The first part of his autobiography, It's Me O Lord, was published posthumously in 1957. His first collection of poems, Hips and Haws (1922, republished 2004, Kessinger Publishing Co., ISBN 1-4179-5513-9) was followed by many others. Some of his poems: "Epitaph," "Forester's Song," "Mendacity," "The Apostate," "The Horse," "The Unfortunate Miller."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition, 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. William Butler Yeats, ed. Oxford University Press, 1936. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.