Bennett, Arnold (1867-1931), was an English novelist and playwright. His best stories are set in the “Five Towns” (actually six) of Stoke-On-Trent, in Staffordshire. Bennett’s writings show the influence of the French naturalists of the 1800’s, who wrote about life with an intense realism and a sense of the power of environmental forces.
Bennett’s best-known novel is The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), a story of two sisters from Bursley, one of the Five Towns. His other Five Towns novels include The Clayhanger Family, a trilogy consisting of Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911), and These Twain (1915). Bennett collaborated with Edward Knoblock on Milestones (1912) and other plays. He dramatized his own comic novel Buried Alive (1908) as The Great Adventure (1913). The diaries published as The Journals of Arnold Bennett (1932-1933) are both a personal record and a minor chronicle of Bennett’s age.
Enoch Arnold Bennett was born on May 27, 1867, in Hanley, Staffordshire, in the district of the Five Towns. He died on March 27, 1931.
