Alfred Edgar Coppard (4 January 1878 – 13 January 1957) was an English author, noted for his poetry and short stories.
Coppard was born the son of a tailor and a housemaid in Folkestone and had little formal education.[1] Coppard 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 to work as an errand boy for a Jewish trouser maker in Whitechapel during the period of the Jack the Ripper murders.
During the early 1920s, still unpublished, he was in Oxford and was part of a literary group, the New Elizabethans, who met in a pub to read Elizabethan drama. W. B. Yeats sometimes attended the meetings. During this period he met Richard Hughes[3] and Edgell Rickword, amongst others.
Coppard was a member of the Independent Labour Party for a period.[4] Coppard's fiction was influenced by Thomas Hardy and was compared favourably to that of H. E. Bates.[5] Coppard's work enjoyed some popularity in the United States after his Collected Tales was chosen as a selection by the Book of the Month Club.[2]
In his mini-biography in Twentieth Century Authors, Coppard lists Abraham Lincoln as the politician he admired most.[6] Coppard also listed Sterne, Dickens, James, Hardy, Shaw, Chekhov and Joyce as authors he valued;[6] conversely, he expressed a dislike for the works of D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and Rudyard Kipling.[6]
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.[7]
In Nancy Cunard's 1937 book Authors take Sides on the Spanish War, Coppard endorsed the Republicans.[8]
A. E. Coppard married the physician and, later, medical broadcaster and writer Winifred de Kok; they had two children. Coppard's nephew was George Coppard, a British soldier who served with the UK Machine Gun Corps during World War I, known for his memoirs With A Machine Gun to Cambrai.[9]
Coppard's short stories were praised by Ford Madox Ford and Frank O'Connor.[2] Coppard's book 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").[10] Coppard's supernatural fiction was admired by Algernon Blackwood.[11] Brian Stableford argues that Coppard's fantasy has a similar style to that of Walter de la Mare and that "many of his mercurial and oddly plaintive fantasies are deeply disturbing".[5]
(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.)