Portal:Staffordshire/Selected biography/2

Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English writer. He is best known as a novelist, but he also worked in other fields such as journalism, propaganda and film. Bennett was born in a modest house in Hanley in the Potteries district of Staffordshire.

Bennett won a literary competition hosted by Tit-Bits magazine in 1889 and was encouraged to take up journalism full-time. In 1894, he became assistant editor of the periodical Woman. He noticed that the material offered by a syndicate to the magazine was not very good, so he wrote a serial which was bought by the syndicate for £75 (equivalent to £10,000 in 2023). He then wrote another. This became The Grand Babylon Hotel. Just over four years later, his first novel, A Man from the North, was published to critical acclaim and he became editor of the magazine.

In 1902, Anna of the Five Towns, the first of a succession of stories which detailed life in the Potteries, appeared. His most famous works are the Clayhanger trilogy and The Old Wives' Tale. These books draw on his experience of life in the Potteries, as did most of his best work. In his novels the Potteries are referred to as "the Five Towns"; Bennett felt that the name was more euphonious than "the Six Towns" so Fenton was omitted.