Edward Morgan Forster, known professionally as E.M. Forster, was an acclaimed English author, celebrated for his novels, particularly A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924). He garnered recognition for his short stories, essays, speeches, and broadcasts, alongside a limited number of biographies and pageant plays. His collaboration on the opera Billy Budd (1951) is also noteworthy. Today, he stands among the most successful novelists of the Edwardian era.

Forster's educational journey began at Tonbridge School, after which he pursued studies in history and classics at King's College, Cambridge. It was here that he formed significant friendships with future luminaries such as Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. His wanderlust led him across Europe before the publication of his debut novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, in 1905. Many of his narratives thoughtfully explore class differences and societal hypocrisy. Notably, Forster was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 22 separate years.

His literature is especially recognized for its ironic and well-plotted examination of class difference and hypocrisy within early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic approach, advocating for understanding and sympathy, is epitomized in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect". Among his five novels published during his lifetime, A Passage to India stands out, addressing the complex dynamics between East and West against the backdrop of India during the later British Raj. As a secular humanist, Forster's work often centers on the pursuit of personal connections and the critique of societal norms.