Edwin William Pugh (1874 - 5 February 1930) was an English writer. He published 33 books, primarily novels and short story collections, and focused on working-class "cockney school" storylines.
The Modernist Journals Project finds that "Pugh's fiction largely goes unread today, and those critics who have read him generally accuse him of sentimentality and melodrama."[1] He also wrote literary criticism praising the works of Charles Dickens.[2]
Life
Pugh was born at 47, Foley Street, Marylebone, London, the second of four children of David Walter Pugh (1843-1887), a theatrical property maker and player with the Covent Garden orchestra.[3] After positive reviews of his first two books, A Street in Suburbia (1895) (a collection of short stories, published when he was 21 years old)[4] and The Man of Straw (1896), Pugh left his job as a clerk to write full-time.[1] After a few years of good fortune, however, Pugh's working class output lost favor, and he struggled with poverty for the rest of his life.[5] He died in London on 5 February 1930.[6]
