It’s the birthday of prolific and refreshingly modest British author H.E. Bates (1905-1974), one of the greatest writers you’ve never heard of. Bates is probably best known for his novella The Darling Buds of May (1958) but was also considered by the likes of Graham Greene to be the greatest short story author of his day.

Herbert Ernest Bates was born in Rushden, Northamptonshire, England, into Humble Circumstances: his parents were shoe-makers, his surroundings pastoral and all that. Bates studied at Kettering Grammar School but could not afford university, beginning working life instead as a reporter. He hated this and quit after two months. He then clerked at a warehouse and simultaneously began writing his first novel, The Two Sisters—that is, actually working on the novel at work, which did not thrill his boss, who fired him. His father then agreed to bankroll the novel for one year (big points for Daddy), and after some rejections, the novel was published in 1926. He began publishing collections of short stories and many other novels (The Poacher, 1935; A House of Women, 1936; My Uncle Silas, 1940).

Bates’ work was well-regarded from the start but his assignment in WWII gave him a huge boost: he was a writer for the Royal Air Force known only as “Flying Officer X” and wrote collections of stories about what he witnessed: The Greatest People in the World (1942), How Sleep the Brave (1943). People figured out who the author really was, and Bates became famous. He also published several war novels, two of which, The Purple Plain (1946) and The Jacaranda Tree (1948), showed British people fleeing. So that’s interesting.

Post-war, Bates continued to publish an astonishing number of books. His most famous were a series about the Larkins, a farm family. The series begins with The Darling Buds of May and continues through four more books, concluding with A Little of What You Fancy (1970); these were adapted very successfully for television by Bates’ son Richard.

Oh: Bates married Madge Cox in 1931, and they converted an old granary into a house where they raised two sons and two daughters and lived for the rest of their lives. The house had a one acre garden, and Bates gardened a lot and taught his children never to capitalize on having a famous father, or even to mention his name in that regard.

If you’d like to read Bates and don’t know where to start, you might consider the collection Elephant’s Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989). Bates has often been compared to Chekhov, which means that anyone who doesn’t rush out and start reading him is a complete rube. (That’s an observation, not a judgment.)

Have a fine and pleasant Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.