Frank Swinnerton (1884 -1982) was an English novelist, critic, biographer and essayist. He left school at fourteen and was determined to pursue a journalist career from an early age. He was first employed as an office boy for a newspaper publisher, Hay, Nisbet & Co; later he worked as a clerk-receptionist for the publishers of Everyman's Library, finally moving at the age of twenty-two to Chatto & Windus, where he became a proofreader and later editor for the next seventeen years. He was a prolific writer and left in his legacy over fifty works which include fiction, literary biographies and essays. Among his best known novels are Nocturn (1917), Quadrille (1965) and Sanctuary (1966). Thanks to his long career in publishing he was acquainted with the generation of writers that included H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett. Swinnerton was often considered to be the last link between the generation of writers whose career peaked over the fin de siècle and high modernism period, and those of the post modern tradition.