Alfred Edgar Coppard (4 January 1878 – 13 January 1957) was an English author, noted for his poetry and short stories.
Lifeedit
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 quit 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.
During the early 1920s, still unpublished, he was in Oxford and was part of a literary group, the New Elizabethans, who met in a pub to read Elizabethan drama. W. B. Yeats sometimes attended the meetings. During 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 was compared favourably to that of H. E. Bates.[5] Coppard's work enjoyed some popularity in the United States after his Collected Tales was chosen as a selection by the Book of the Month Club.[2]
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 allegoricalfantasy.[7]
A. E. Coppard married the physician and, later, medical broadcaster and writer Winifred de Kok; they had two children. Coppard's nephew was George Coppard, a British soldier who served with the UK Machine Gun Corps during World War I, known for his memoirs With A Machine Gun to Cambrai.[9]
Critical receptionedit
Coppard's short stories were praised by Ford Madox Ford and Frank O'Connor.[2] Coppard's book Nixey's Harlequin received good reviews from Leonard Strong, Gerald Bullett, and The Times Literary Supplement (which praised Coppard's "brilliant virtuosity as a pure spinner of tales").[10] Coppard's supernatural fiction was admired by Algernon Blackwood.[11] Brian Stableford argues that 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]
Fabes, Gilbert H., The First Editions of A. E. Coppard, A. P. Herbert and Charles Morgan, 1933 London: Myers.
Jehin, A. Remarks on the Style of A.E. Coppard. Buenos Aires, 1944.
Saul, George Brandon, A.E. Coppard: His Life and Poetry,1932, University of Pennsylvania, PhD dissertation.
Schwartz, Jacob with foreword and notes by A. E. Coppard, A Bibliography of A. E. Coppard - The Writings of Alfred Edgar Coppard, 1931.
Smith, Frank Edmund, Flynn: A Study of A. E. Coppard and His Short Fiction (1973).
Referencesedit
Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. pp. 83–84.
Notesedit
^This is Folkestone Archived 19 August 2008 at the Wayback Machine
^ abc"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).
^Richard Perceval Graves, Richard Hughes (1994), p. 52.
^A. E. Coppard, It's Me, Oh Lord! Methuen, 1957, (p.148-9)
^ ab"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).
^ abcTwentieth 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)
^"Coppard, A.E.", in Brian Stableford, The A to Z of Fantasy Literature. Scarecrow Press, 2005 (p.89).
^Katharine Bail Hoskins, Today the Struggle: Literature and Politics in England during the Spanish Civil War. University of Texas Press, 1969 (p.18)
^George Coppard, With A Machine Gun to Cambrai, (1969), p. 16.
^Advertisement for Nixey's Harlequin in The American Mercury, January 1932, (p.145).