Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born in 1905 near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become managing director of an engineering business, writing novels in his spare time. His first novel, Blindness (1926) was written whilst he was still at school and published whilst he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and during the Second World War served in the London Fire Brigade. Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels, Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing and Doting, and a memoir, Pack My Bag. Henry Green died in December 1973

"The most gifted prose writer of his generation" V. S. Pritchett "Each of Green's books stands apart from the others as a separate feat in itself" -- Alan Pryce-Jones Observer "Green's novels are sufficiently unlikle any others, sufficiently assured in their perilous, luminous fullness, to warrant the epithet incomparable...they have become, with time, photographs of a vanished England...Green's human qualities - his love of work and laughter; his absolute empathy; his sense of splendour amid loss - make him a precious witness to any age" John Updike "Green's works live with ever-brightening intensity--it's like dancing with Nijinsky or Astaire, who lead you effortlessly on." The Wall Street Journal