Thomas Hardy poet and writer English, was born in 1840 with Upper Bockhampton, hamlet close to Dorchester. Of its studies, it keeps the taste of Latin poetry. He learns the all alone Greek for reading Homère and the New Testament. Darwin and biblical criticism makes him lose the religious faith of which it carries mourning all his life.

Very early, he writes poems, of which some will be born thirty or forty years later. In 1867, it turns to the novel to try to live of its feather. Passed the first difficulties, it succeeds honourably. He is soon supplier of the reviews and the magazines. Of 1871 with 1896, it writes fourteen novels and four collections of news. A half-dozen of philosopher's stones emergent of this unequal production:

• Barbara ( ) - 1874
• the Return to the native land ( ) - 1878
• the Mayor of Casterbridge ( ) - 1886
• the Foresters ( ) - 1887
• Tess d' Urberville ( ) - 1891
• Jude Obscure the ( ) - 1896

All the novels without exception are held in the south-west of the England. The close Dorset and counties are transmuted into literary kingdom that Hardy calls the Wessex, of the name of the old kingdom of the Saxons of the West. Wessex seems a province of imagination.

After the scandal started by Jude, Thomas Hardy gives up the novel. The Dynasts , composed between 1903 and 1908, is a vast dramatic poem on the Napoleonean epopee. Hardy wrote in addition nearly a thousand of rather unequal poems. The elegies of Veteris Vestigia Flammae, written after the death of his first wife which has occurred in 1912, form a group of a rare perfection.

Thomas Hardy dies in 1928.

Adaptations to the cinema: " Far From the Madding Crowd" was adapted to the cinema by John Schlesinger in 1967 pennies the title " Far from crowd déchaînée" (with Julie Christie, Terence Stamp and Alan Packsaddlled). " Tess d' Urberville" was adapted to the cinema by Roman Polanski in 1979 pennies the title Tess (with Nastassja Kinski). " Jude Obscur" was adapted to the cinema by Michael Winterbottom in 1996 pennies the title Jude (with Kate Winslet).

Simple: Thomas Hardy