Who said: "Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem."

"Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem."
– John Galsworthy


John Galsworthy (1867-1933), born and brought up in Britain, was educated at Harrow and studied law at New College, Oxford. He began to write at twenty-eight after traveling widely. His first stories were published under the pseudonym John Sinjohn but were later were withdrawn.

As a novelist he is best known for The Forsyte Saga about an upper-middle class 'new money' family. The Man of Property (1906) was the first in the series. Fifteen years later, after World War I, he continued with In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921). He also wrote two interludes, Indian Summer of a Forsyte" (1918) and Awakening, which were published in one volume in 1922.

A further trilogy, The Forsyte Saga: A Modern Comedy, followed in the 1920s consisting of The White Monkey (1924), The Silver Spoon (1926) and Swan Song (1928); rounded out by two interludes - A Silent Wooing and Passers By (1928).

The 1930s saw the publication of The Forsyte Saga : End of the Chapter Maid in Waiting (1932), Flowering Wilderness (1933) and Over the River (1933); plus a collection of short stories: On Forsyte Change (1930).

Meanwhile, he also wrote a wealth of other novels, short stories and plays far too numerous to mention.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 and died the following year of a brain tumor, leaving two final volumes of the Forsyte saga to be published posthumously.

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