A. E. Coppard

[1] He grew up in difficult, poverty-stricken circumstances; he later described his childhood as "shockingly poor" and Frank O'Connor described Coppard's early life as 'cruel'.

[2] He quit school at the age of nine when his father died and was "taken off to London" to live with his uncle's family in "a street between Old Ford and Victoria Park".

[7] After the war, Coppard separated from his wife and went to live in ‘Shepherd's Pit’, a cottage outside Headington where he set about becoming a full-time writer.

[2] His 1931 collection Nixey's Harlequin received good reviews from Leonard Strong, Gerald Bullett, and The Times Literary Supplement (which praised Coppard's "brilliant virtuosity as a pure spinner of tales").

Reviewing Banks's selection in the London Review of Books, Blake Morrison noted that Coppard's tales "are chiefly concerned with ... romantic intrigue, disappointment and despair" but that his best work had rural settings: "[Coppard's] rare forays into an urban middle-class setting are unconvincing; unless his characters are speaking in rural dialect, with a keen attentiveness to the natural world, they sound off key.

In December 1967 a BBC1 Omnibus programme directed by Jack Gold featured versions of ‘The Field of Mustard’, ‘Adam and Eve and Pinch Me’ and ‘Dusky Ruth’.

(Coppard was one of the contributors to this book; the others were Seán Ó Faoláin, Elizabeth Bowen, John Van Druten, Gladys Bronwyn Stern, Ronald Fraser, Malachi Whitaker, Norah Hoult and Hamish Maclaren.)