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Alfred Edgar Coppard (4 January 187813 January 1957) was an English writer, noted for his influence on the short story form, and poet. ==Life== Coppard was born the son of a tailor and a housemaid in Folkestone, and had little formal education.〔(This is Folkestone )〕 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".〔"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).〕 He left 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. In the early 1920s, and still unpublished, he was in Oxford and a leading light of a literary group, the ''New Elizabethans'', who met in a pub to read Elizabethan drama. W. B. Yeats sometimes attended the meetings. At this period he met Richard Hughes〔Richard Perceval Graves, ''Richard Hughes'' (1994), p. 52.〕 and Edgell Rickword, amongst others. Coppard was a member of the Independent Labour Party for a period.〔A. E. Coppard, ''It's Me, Oh Lord!'' Methuen, 1957, (p.148-9)〕 Coppard's fiction was influenced by Thomas Hardy and on its initial publication, favourably compared to that of H. E. Bates.〔"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).〕 Coppard's work enjoyed a surge in popularity in the US after his ''Selected Tales'' was chosen as a selection by the Book of the Month Club.〔 In the profile in ''Twentieth Century Authors'', Coppard lists Abraham Lincoln as the politician he most admired.〔''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)〕 Coppard also listed Sterne, Dickens, James, Hardy, Shaw, Chekhov and Joyce as authors he valued;〔 conversely, he expressed a dislike for the works of D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and Rudyard Kipling.〔 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.〔"Coppard, A.E.", in Brian Stableford, ''The A to Z of Fantasy Literature''. Scarecrow Press, 2005 (p.89).〕 In Nancy Cunard's 1937 book ''Authors take Sides on the Spanish War'', Coppard took the side of the Republicans.〔Katharine Bail Hoskins, ''Today the Struggle: Literature and Politics in England during the Spanish Civil War''. University of Texas Press, 1969 (p.18)〕 A.E. Coppard was the uncle of George Coppard, a British soldier who served with the Machine Gun Corps during World War I, known for his memoirs ''With A Machine Gun to Cambrai.''〔George Coppard, ''With A Machine Gun to Cambrai,'' (1969), p. 16.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「A. E. Coppard」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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