Arnold Bennett - Six of the Best

Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number.

Such is its popularity that we thought it is also a very good way of challenging and investigating an author’s work to give width, brevity, humour and depth across six of their very best.

In this series we gather together authors whose short stories both rivet the attention and inspire the imagination to visit their gems in a series of six, to roam across an author’s legacy in a few short hours and gain a greater understanding of their writing and, of course, to be lavishly entertained by their ideas, their narrative and their way with words.

These stories can be surprising and sometimes at a tangent to what we expected, but each is fully formed and a marvellous adventure into the world and words of a literary master.

Enoch Arnold Bennett was born on the 27th May 1867 in Hanley, one of the six towns that formed the Potteries and that later joined together to become Stoke-On-Trent.

After passing entrance examinations for Cambridge University his solicitor father instead decided that he should work for him, unpaid, in his thriving office. In the evenings the young Bennett wrote or studied and one skill he developed was Pitman’s shorthand which gave him entrance to a position as a clerk at a solicitor’s office in London. From there followed various jobs but none seemed to be able to ignite his career as a full-time author.

By 1903 he had moved to live in Paris; he was 35, unmarried and keen to settle into his new life. In 1908 he published his first remarkable novel; ‘Clayhanger’, that drew on his earlier life in the Potteries.

A prolific writer he was able to deliver very fine works but also write many that were described as ‘potboilers’. Despite this disclaimer many were lapped up by an audience eager for his prose and helped turn him into the most financially successful author of the times.

As the First World War drew to a close, he was appointed to run the Ministry of Information. During the 1920s he was reputedly the highest paid literary journalist in the land and continued to write novels, plays and short stories.

Arnold Bennett died in his flat at Chiltern Court on the 27th March 1931, from typhoid after drinking water in France on his last holiday. He was 63.

© 2025 Six of the Best (E-bog): 9781806373611

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E-bog: 4. november 2025