Eden Phillpotts was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

, poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 and dramatist. He was born in India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

, educated in Plymouth

Plymouth

Plymouth is a city and unitary authority area on the coast of Devon, England, about south-west of London. It is built between the mouths of the rivers Plym to the east and Tamar to the west, where they join Plymouth Sound...

, Devon

Devon

Devon is a large county in southwestern England. The county is sometimes referred to as Devonshire, although the term is rarely used inside the county itself as the county has never been officially "shired", it often indicates a traditional or historical context.The county shares borders with...

, and worked as an insurance officer for 10 years before studying for the stage and eventually becoming a writer.

He was the author of many novels, plays and poems about Dartmoor

Dartmoor

Dartmoor is an area of moorland in south Devon, England. Protected by National Park status, it covers .The granite upland dates from the Carboniferous period of geological history. The moorland is capped with many exposed granite hilltops known as tors, providing habitats for Dartmoor wildlife. The...

. His Dartmoor cycle of 18 novels and two volumes of short stories still have many avid readers despite the fact that many titles are out of print.

Phillpotts also wrote many other books with a Dartmoor setting. He was for many years the President of the Dartmoor Preservation Association

Dartmoor Preservation Association

The Dartmoor Preservation Association, or DPA, was founded in 1883. It is a charity, which provides an independent viewpoint on the current issues affecting Dartmoor and performs valuable conservation work on archaeological sites...

 and cared passionately about the conservation of Dartmoor.

One of his novels, Widecombe Fair, inspired by an annual fair

Widecombe Fair

Widecombe Fair takes place annually on the second Tuesday in September, attracting thousands of visitors to the tiny Dartmoor village of Widecombe-in-the-Moor...

 at the village of Widecombe-in-the-Moor

Widecombe-in-the-Moor

Widecombe-in-the-Moor is a small village located within the heart of the Dartmoor National Park in Devon, England. . The name is thought to derive from 'Withy-combe' which means Willow Valley....

, provided the scenario for his comic play The Farmer's Wife

The Farmer's Wife

The Farmer’s Wife is a silent film, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.It was based on a play of the same name by British novelist, poet and playwright Eden Phillpotts, best known for a series of novels based on Dartmoor, in Devon.-Synopsis:...

. It went on to become a silent movie of the same name, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...

 and filmed in 1927. The cast included: Jameson Thomas

Jameson Thomas

Jameson Thomas was an English film actor. He appeared in 82 films between 1923 and 1939.He was born in London and died in Sierra Madre, California, it is said from Tuberculosis....

, Lillian Hall-Davis

Lillian Hall-Davis

Lillian Hall-Davis was a British actress during the silent era.The daughter of a London taxi driver, her films included a part-color version of I Pagliacci , The Passionate Adventure , Quo Vadis , Blighty , The Ring and The Farmer's Wife , the latter two both directed by Alfred Hitchcock...

, Gordon Harker

Gordon Harker

Gordon Harker was an English film actor. He appeared in 68 films between 1921 and 1959, including three films directed by Alfred Hitchcock and a cameo appearance in Elstree Calling , a revue film co-directed by Hitchcock...

 and Gibb McLaughlin

Gibb McLaughlin

Gibb McLaughlin was an English film actor. He appeared in 118 films between 1921 and 1959. He was born in Sunderland, England and died in London, England.-Selected filmography:* The Road to London...

.

Phillpotts was a friend of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...

, who was an admirer of his work and a regular visitor to his home. Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

 was another admirer.

Some of his novels about Dartmoor include:

• Children of the Mist (1898)
• Sons of the Morning (1900)
• The River (1902)
• The American Prisoner
  The American Prisoner
  The American Prisoner is a novel written by Eden Phillpotts, published in America in 1904 and adapted into a film in 1929. The story concerns an English woman who lives at Fox Tor farm, and an American captured during the American Revolutionary War and held at the prison at Princetown on...
  
  (1904)
• The Whirlwind (1907)
• The Mother (1908)
• The Virgin in Judgment (1908)
• The Three Brothers (1909)
• The Thief of Virtue (1910)
• The Beacon (1911)
• The Forest on the Hill (1912)
• Orphan Dinah (1920)

He also wrote a series of novels each set against the background of a different trade or industry. Titles include: Brunel's Tower (a pottery), Storm in a Teacup (hand-papermaking).

Among his other works is The Grey Room, the plot of which is centered on a haunted room in an English manor house. He also wrote a number of other mystery novels, both under his own name and the pseudonym Harrington Hext. Titles include: The Thing at Their Heels, The Red Redmaynes, The Monster, The Clue from the Stars and The Captain's Curio.

The Human Boy was a collection of schoolboy stories in the same genre as say, Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...

's Stalky & Co.

Stalky & Co.

Stalky & Co. is a book published in 1899 by Rudyard Kipling, about adolescent boys at a British boarding school. It is a collection of linked short stories in format, with some information about the charismatic Stalky character in later life. The character Beetle, one of the main trio, is partly...

, though different in mood and style.

Although mainly a novelist, he also wrote several plays, the most famous being Yellow Sands

Yellow Sands

Yellow Sands is a play which opened at the Haymarket Theatre, London in 1925, where it ran for 610 performances, and at the Fulton Theatre, New York on September 10, 1927, where it ran for 25 performances, closing in October 1927. It was written by Eden Phillpotts and his daughter Adelaide...

.

Phillpotts was an agnostic and a supporter of the Rationalist Press Association.
Late in his long writing career he wrote a few books of interest to science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 and
fantasy

Fantasy

Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...

 readers, the most noteworthy being Saurus, which involves an alien reptilian being observing human life, somewhat after the fashion in which ethnographers observed peoples deemed "primitive" at that time.

External links

• Works by or about Eden Phillpotts at Internet Archive
  Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
  
  (scanned books original editions color illustrated) (plain text and HTML)