BENNETT, ENOCH ARNOLD English novelist and dramatist, born at Hanley, Staffordshire on May 27, 1867. After leaving school he entered a lawyer's office, but in 1893, having published several stories and articles, decided to devote himself to writing and settled in London where he obtained the position of assistant-editor on the magazine, Woman. He suc ceeded to the editorship in 1896. It was not till after he was 30 years old that his first novel, A Man From the North (1898), was published. In 190o he resigned his editorship, and since then he has been a prolific writer of fiction and miscellaneous literature. As book after book appeared under his name—books as various as The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), Anna of the Five Towns (1904), The Truth About An Author (19ó3)—it was impossible to doubt that a fresh kind of whimsical impudent and realistic imag ination was engaged in the task of providing us with literary enter tainment. Here was a writer who made ordinary life seem extra ordinary, who mingled the real and the fantastic, and who had humour, candour and knowledge of a hard world that to most readers was as foreign as fairyland. It was not yet certain, how ever, that Mr. Bennett would ever do justice to his talent. Many people regarded him merely as an exceptionally skilful writer for the market till at the age of 4o he published The Old Wives' Tale (1908) and took his place among the modern masters of fiction. Mr. Bennett proceeded to justify the praises he had won with The Old Wives' Tale by writing a succession of remarkable novels and short stories, Clayhanger (1910), The Card (191I ), Hilda Lessways (191I ), and The Matador of the Five Towns (1912). This was the most exuberant period of his cared'. Clayhanger is a chapter of English social history, and in it and its sequels, Hilda Lessways and These Twain (1916), he has made the people of the Five Towns as real to the imagination as the people of Trollope's Barsetshire. Neither of the sequels is a book on the same level as Clayhanger, but the three novels form a trilogy which is one of the literary monuments of the age. And if Clayhanger is a master piece, The Card, a picaresque story of a successful man, is no less so. Meanwhile Mr. Bennett had written a number of plays, in cluding Milestones (1912), in which he collaborated with Mr. Edward Knoblock. In 1913 his very successful play, The Great Adventure (founded on his novel, Buried Alive) was produced. During the next ten years Mr. Bennett continued to write novels, plays, literary criticism and (during the war with Germany) political articles without adding to his reputation. He was always pungent, always efficient, always interesting, but he seemed to be getting more and more remote from the life he knew best, and in The Pretty Lady (1918) he wrote of London follies with more cunning than inspiration. Then, in 1923, with Riceyman Steps, a study of miserliness, he added another novel to the list of his masterpieces. Here, once more, he expressed what a critic has called "his vision of the astounding bizarrerie of daily life." It is the sincerity of that vision which has made Mr. Bennett as indi vidual an interpreter of the life of his own time or people as Mr. Kipling or Sir J. M. Barrie. He can invest even what is uninter esting with prodigious interest, and the lives of the dull become exciting in his hands. We find the same appetite for life in his volumes of commonsense philosophy and in his causeries on books as in his novels and short stories. He is eagerly intent on the modern spectacle, and absorbs books, music, painting and ideas to a point at which less robust men would grow satiated. It is said that he misses the finer delicacies of prose but it is impossible to deny that he is an artist as well as a writer of genius. There is a buried poet—and Mr. Bennett has written and published verse— in a writer who can recreate as he has done the legend of the troubled lives of mortals and their pathetic and wonderful joys. Bennett died on March 27, 1931. (R. LD.)