Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) Hap, The Ruined Maid LINKS Thomas Hardy Resource Library http://pages.ripco.com:8080/~mws/hardy.html This helpful site includes information about Hardy's works, his life, and his home in Dorchester. It also contains a "graphics library" of photos of the author, articles about his works, and comments on film versions of his novels. The Academy of American Poets - Poetry Exhibits: Thomas Hardy http://www.poets.org/lit/POET/thardy.htm This site provides a brief biography of Hardy, a selected bibliography, the texts of several of his poems, and a list of links. BIOGRAPHY Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) Hardy was born near Dorchester, in southeastern England (on which he based the "Wessex" of many of his novels and poems). Hardy worked for the ecclesiastical architect John Hicks from 1856 to 1861. He then moved to London to practice architecture, and took evening classes at King's College for six years. In 1867, he gave up architecture to become a full-time writer, and after writing short stories and poems found success as a novelist. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) reveal Hardy's concern for victims of circumstance and his appeal to humanitarian sympathy in readers. After his novel Jude the Obscure (1896) was strongly criticized, Hardy set aside prose fiction and returned to poetry—a genre in which he was most prolific and successful after he reached the age of seventy.