A. E. Coppard

Alfred Edgar Coppard (4 January 1878–13 January 1957) was an English writer, noted for his influence on the short story form, and poet.

Life

He was born, the son of a tailor and a housemaid, in Folkestone, and had little formal education.^[1] He left school at the age of nine to work as an errand boy for a Jewish trouser maker in Whitechapel during the period of the Jack the Ripper murders.

In the early 1920s, and still unpublished, he was in Oxford and a leading light of a literary group, the New Elizabethans, who met in a pub to read Elizabethan drama. W. B. Yeats sometimes attended the meetings. At this period he met Richard Hughes^[2] and Edgell Rickword, amongst others.

Some of Coppard's collections, such as Adam and Eve and Pinch Me and Fearful Pleasures, contain stories with fantastic elements, either of supernatural horror or allegorical fantasy. ^[3]

A.E. Coppard was the uncle of George Coppard, a British soldier who served with the Machine Gun Corps during World War I, known for his memoirs With A Machine Gun to Cambrai.^[4]

Works

Story Collections

• Adam & Eve & Pinch Me (1921)
• Clorinda Walks in Heaven (1922)
• The Black Dog and Other Stories (1923)
• Fishmonger's Fiddle: Tales (1925)
• The Field of Mustard (1926)
• Silver Circus (1928)
• Nixey's Harlequin (1931)
• Fare Please! (1931)
• Crotty Shinkwin and The Beauty Spot (1932)
• Dunky Fitlow (1933)
• Ring the Bells of Heaven (1933)
• Pink Furniture (1935)
• Polly Oliver (1935)
• Ninepenny Flute (1937)
• You Never Know, Do You? (1939)
• Ugly Anna (1944)
• Fearful Pleasures (1946)
• Selected Tales (1946)
• The Dark Eyed Lady – Fourteen Tales (1947)
• Collected Tales (1948)
• Lucy in Her Pink Coat (1954)
• Selected Stories (1972)
• The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard (1976)
• The Higgler and Other Stories (1991)
• The Man from the Caravan and Other Stories (1999)
• Father Raven and Other Tales (2006)

Poetry Collections

• Hips and Haws (1922)
• Yokohoma Garland & Other Poems (1926)
• Pelaga and Other Poems (1926)
• The Collected Poems of A. E. Coppard (1928)
• Cherry Ripe: Poems (1935)
• Simple Day: Selected Poems (1978)

Autobiography

• It's Me, O Lord! (1957)

Further reading

• Fabes, Gilbert H., The First Editions of A. E. Coppard, A. P. Herbert and Charles Morgan, 1933 London: Myers.
• Saul, George Brandon, A.E. Coppard: His Life and Poetry,1932, University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. dissertation.
• Schwartz, Jacob with foreword and notes by A. E. Coppard, A Bibliography of A. E. Coppard - The Writings of Alfred Edgar Coppard, 1931.

References

• Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. pp. 83–84. 

Notes

1. ^ http://www.thisisfolkestone.co.uk/famousresidents3.htm
2. ^ Richard Perceval Graves, Richard Hughes (1994), p. 52.
3. ^ "Coppard, A.E", in Brian Stableford, The A to Z of Fantasy Literature. Scarecrow Press, 2005 (p.89).
4. ^ George Coppard, With A Machine Gun to Cambrai, (1969), p. 16.

External links

• AE Coppard at the Supernatural Fiction Database
• Archival material relating to A. E. Coppard listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• A. E. Coppard at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Persondata
Name	Coppard, Alfred
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1878
Place of birth
Date of death	1957
Place of death