On this day in 1924, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India was published. It was a commercial and critical success, and it would confirm Forster's status as one of the 20th century's most important writers, but it was his last novel. Various reasons are given to explain why, at just forty-five years of age, and with another forty-five to go, Forster made what appears to be an intentional decision to give up novel writing. Forster's comments that he felt bored by the genre, or felt it to require "a certain amount of stability" that the modern world did not provide, are often interpreted as evidence of old-fogeyism - the idea being that the man could be friendly to
