R. C. Sherriff (Robert Cedric Sherriff) Biography

British playwright, born in Kingston-on-Thames. He followed his father into a local insurance office, and wrote what became his best-known play, Journey's End (1928), to raise money for his rowing club. Though he subsequently wrote eight others, ranging from the rustic comedy Badger's Green (1930) to the moral ghost story The White Carnation (1953), none matched the success he achieved with this sensitive, unsentimental portrait of unheroic heroism as he himself had experienced it as a captain in the trenches of the First World War.