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Alfred Edgar Coppard (4 January 1878 – 13 January 1957) was an English author, noted for his poetry and short stories.

Coppard's wife and two children
Coppard's wife and two children


Life


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During the early 1920s, still unpublished, he was in Oxford and was part of a literary group, the New Elizabethans, who met in a pub to read Elizabethan drama.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 Selected Tales was chosen as a selection by the Book of the Month Club.[2]

In his mini-biography in Twentieth Century Authors, Coppard lists Abraham Lincoln as the politician he admired most.[6] Coppard also listed Sterne, Dickens, James, Hardy, Shaw, Chekhov and Joyce as authors he valued;[6] conversely, he expressed a dislike for the works of D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and Rudyard Kipling.[6]

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 allegorical fantasy.[7]

In Nancy Cunard's 1937 book Authors take Sides on the Spanish War, Coppard endorsed the Republicans.[8]

A. E. Coppard was the uncle of 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 reception


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]


Works



Story collections



Poetry collections



Chapbooks



Non-Fiction



As editor



Contributor


(Coppard was one of the contributors to this book; the others were Seán Ó Faoláin, Elizabeth Bowen, John Van Druten, Gladys Bronwyn Stern, Ronald Fraser, Malachi Whitaker, Norah Hoult and Hamish Maclaren.)


Autobiography



Further reading



References



Notes


  1. This is Folkestone Archived 19 August 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  2. "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).
  3. Richard Perceval Graves, Richard Hughes (1994), p. 52.
  4. A. E. Coppard, It's Me, Oh Lord! Methuen, 1957, (p.148-9)
  5. "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).
  6. Twentieth 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)
  7. "Coppard, A.E.", in Brian Stableford, The A to Z of Fantasy Literature. Scarecrow Press, 2005 (p.89).
  8. Katharine Bail Hoskins, Today the Struggle: Literature and Politics in England during the Spanish Civil War. University of Texas Press, 1969 (p.18)
  9. George Coppard, With A Machine Gun to Cambrai, (1969), p. 16.
  10. Advertisement for Nixey's Harlequin in The American Mercury, January 1932, (p.145).
  11. "Blackwood was widely read in supernatural fiction and he remarked to Derleth that authors like A. E. Coppard, H. Russell Wakefield, Henry S. Whitehead, May Sinclair and Mary Wilkins Freeman never failed to please." Mike Ashley, Starlight Man : The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood. London : Constable, 2001. ISBN 1841194174 (p.321)




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