After attending Tonbridge School, Forster studied history and classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he met fellow future writers such as Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf.

Many of his novels were posthumously adapted for cinema, including Merchant Ivory Productions of A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987) and Howards End (1992), critically acclaimed period dramas which featured lavish sets and esteemed British actors, including Helena Bonham Carter, Daniel Day-Lewis, Hugh Grant, Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

He then sought a post in Germany, to learn the language, and spent several months in the summer of 1905 in Nassenheide, Pomerania (now the Polish village of Rzędziny), as a tutor to the children of the writer Elizabeth von Arnim.

[17] As a conscientious objector in the First World War, Forster served as a Chief Searcher (for missing servicemen) for the British Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt.

In addition to his broadcasting, he advocated individual liberty and penal reform and opposed censorship by writing articles, sitting on committees and signing letters.

[26] In 1960, Forster began a relationship with the Bulgarian émigré Mattei Radev, a picture framer and art collector who moved in Bloomsbury group circles.

In April 1947 he arrived in America for a three-month nationwide tour of public readings and sightseeing, returning to the East Coast in June.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), tells of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano).

Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted as a 1991 film directed by Charles Sturridge, starring Helena Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves, Judy Davis and Helen Mirren.

[39] Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted Bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then a post as a schoolmaster, married to an unappealing Agnes Pembroke.

In a series of scenes on the Wiltshire hills, which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.

It explores young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with a cousin and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel about various groups among the Edwardian middle classes, represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants).

Howards End was adapted as a film in 1992 by the Merchant-Ivory team, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, and Helena Bonham-Carter.

Forster connects personal relations with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves.

Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in a preface to its Everyman's Library Edition.

[44] Maurice (1971), published posthumously, is a homosexual love story that also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire.

It starred James Wilby and Hugh Grant who played lovers (for which both gained acclaim) and Rupert Graves, with Denholm Elliott, Simon Callow and Ben Kingsley in the supporting cast.

[47] Early in his career, Forster attempted a historical novel about the Byzantine scholar Gemistus Pletho and the Italian condottiero Sigismondo de Malatesta, but was dissatisfied with the result and never published it, though he kept the manuscript and later showed it to Naomi Mitchison.

The Manchester Guardian commented on Howards End, describing it as "a novel of high quality written with what appears to be a feminine brilliance of perception... witty and penetrating.

"[52] An essay by David Cecil in Poets and Storytellers (1949) describes Forster as "pulsing with intelligence and sensibility", but primarily concerned with an original moral vision: "He tells a story as well as anyone who ever lived".

[53][page needed] The beginning of technological dystopian fiction is traced to Forster's "The Machine Stops", a 1909 short story where most people live underground in isolation.

[54][55] M Keith Booker states that "The Machine Stops," We and Brave New World are "the great defining texts of the genre of dystopian fiction, both in [the] vividness of their engagement with real-world social and political issues and in the scope of their critique of the societies on which they focus.

"[56] Will Gompertz for the BBC writes, "The Machine Stops is not simply prescient; it is a jaw-droppingly, gob-smackingly, breath-takingly accurate literary description of lockdown life in 2020.

(Trilling 1943) Criticism of his works has included comments on unlikely pairings of characters who marry or get engaged and the lack of realistic depiction of sexual attraction.

Beyond his literary explorations of sexuality, Forster also expressed his views publicly; in 1953, Forster openly advocated in The New Statesman and Nation for a change in the law in regard to homosexuality (which would be legalised in England and Wales in 1967, three years prior to his death), arguing that homosexuality between adults should be treated without bias and on the same grounds as heterosexuality.

Forster, Henry James, and W. Somerset Maugham were the earliest writers in English to portray characters from diverse countries – France, Germany, Italy and India.