Enoch Arnold Bennett, the son of a solicitor, was born in 1867 in Hanley, Staffordshire. At twenty-one, he moved to London, initially to work as a solicitor’s clerk, but soon turned to writing popular serial fiction and editing a women’s magazine. After the publication of his first novel, A Man From the North in 1898, he became a professional writer.

Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, Charles Masterman who was head of the War Propaganda Bureau invited Bennett, along with the likes of Chesterton, Conan-Doyle, Kipling, Hardy and Wells to discuss ways of promoting Britain's interests during the war.  Bennett joined these secret moves and published articles stating Britain's case for war, later defending these and other propaganda against attacks on them by Bernard Shaw. He was, however, shocked to discover the conditions under which the soldiers operated in the trenches and was physically ill for some time after a visit to the front, but did not make his feelings publicly known in order not to undermine the war effort.

Later he moved to Paris as Director of British propaganda in France and went on to become a man of cosmopolitan and discerning tastes.

Bennett’s great reputation as a writer is built upon the success of his novels and short stories set in the Potteries, an area of north Staffordshire that he recreated as the ‘Five Towns’. Anna of the Five Towns and The Old Wives’ Tale show the influence of Flaubert, Maupassant and Balzac as Bennett describes provincial life in great detail. Arnold Bennett is an important link between the English novel and European realism. He wrote several plays and lighter works such as The Grand Babylon Hotel and The Card.

Arnold Bennett died in 1931.