Eden Phillpotts Biography

British writer, born in India, educated in Plymouth, Devon. He abandoned a stage career and worked for ten years in an insurance office before embarking on a reclusive career as a writer. He wrote 250 books, many of them set in Devon, including the novels Children of the Mist (1898) and Widecombe Fair (1913), both set in Dartmoor. His novel The Farmer's Wife (1917) in a dramatized version written in collaboration with his daughter, Adelaide Phillpotts, met with great success on the London stage in 1924, as did Yellow Sands (1926) by the same authors. He wrote several other plays (some in collaboration with Arnold Bennett and J. K. Jerome), volumes of verse, essays, several detective novels, including A Voice from the Dark (1925), and science fiction, such as The Apes (1929), Saurus (1938), and Address Unknown (1949).