Thomas Hardy , born on 2nd June, 1840 was a novelist and a short story writer. He was also a poet and he did his work more for financial profits. Most of his works depict strong characters struggling against circumstances. Later he write poems in his fifties and they became as popular as his novels.

He was born at Higher Bockhampton, located to the east of Dorchester, England. His father was a stone mason and a builder. His mother was a well read, ambitious woman who helped him in his primary education. At the age of 16, he joined as an apprentice to a local architect John Hicks. Before moving to London, he got trained as an architect in Dorchester. In 1862 he moved to London and got admission into King’s College London. Though he won awards and prizes, he never liked to be away from home and returned to Dorset and started writing his own work.

Hardy’s wrote his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady in the year 1867 but he failed to find a publisher who was willing to publish his book. Disappointed with this, he destroyed the manuscript of the novel and so only parts of the novel were retrieved in the later years.

His friend and mentor George Meredith, who was a Victorian poet encouraged him to write an other book and this resulted in Desperate Remedies and Under the Greenwood Tree which were published anonymously in the years 1871 and 1872 respectively. In 1873, his novel A Pair of Blue Eyes was published under his name. This is followed by Far from the Madding Crowd which was published in the year 1874.

These novels became very successful and this inspired him to write ten more novels in the next twenty five years. He gave up his architect work to give the complete time to writing. The other novels from him are The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), The Return of the Native (1878), A Laodicean (1881), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Wessex Tales (1888, which is a collection of short stories), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Life’s Little Ironies (1894, which is a collection of short stories), Jude the Obscure (1895).

He got as much acclaim through him poems as he got through his novels. In 1898, he published his first volume of poems called Wessex Poems, which were a collection of poems he wrote through thirty years. The success inspired him to write some more poems and he continued writing poems till his death in 1923. These poems are applauded in recent times more than they were at his time. Generally, he used to write poems with the theme of disappointment in life or love, struggling and human suffering. His poetry work includes The Photograph (1890), Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898), Poems of the Past and Present (1901), The Dynasts, Part 1 (1904), The Dynasts, Part 2 (1906), The Dynasts, Part 3 (1908), Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909), Satires of Circumstance (1914), Moments of Vision (1917), Collected Poems (1919), Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses (1922), Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925), and Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928).

On the personal front, he married Emma Lavinia Gifford in the year 1874. She died in the year 1912 and this had a very traumatic effect on him. He explored places then and in the year 1914, he married his secretary Florence Dugdale.

He fell ill with pleurisy in the last quarter of 1927 and he died on 11th of January the next year. He recited his last poem to his wife when he was on deathbed.