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Forster contributed reviews and essays to numerous journals, most notably the Listener, he was an active member of PEN, in 1934 he became the first president of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and after his mother's death in 1945, he was elected an honorary fellow of King's and lived there for the remainder of his life. In 1949 Forster refused a knighthood and in 1951 he collaborated with Eric Crozier on the libretto of Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd, which was based on Herman Melville's novel (film 1962, dir. by Peter Ustinov). Forster was made a Companion of Honour in 1953 and in 1969 he accepted an Order of Merit. Forster died on June 7, 1970.
"So Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism."
Forster often criticized in his books Victorian middle class attitudes and British colonialism through strong woman characters. However, Forster's characters were not one-dimensional heroes and villains, and except his devotion to such values as tolerance and sense of comedy, he was uncommitted. "For we must admit that flat people are not in themselves as big achievement as round ones, and also that they are best when they are comic. A serious or tragic flat character is apt to be a bore. Each time he enters crying 'Revenge!' or 'My heart bleeds for humanity!' or whatever his formula is, out hearts sink." (from Aspects of the Novel) The epithet 'Fosterian' - liberal, unconventional, sceptical, moral - had started to circulate since the publication of Howard's End. Forster's famous essay 'Two Cheers for Democracy' (also: 'What I Believe'), which was originally printed in 1938 in the New York Nation reflected his concern for individual liberty. He assumed liberal humanism not dogmatically but ironically, writing in unceremonious sentences and making gentle stabs at pomposity and hypocrisy "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." (from 'Two cheers for Democracy') The British Humanist Association has reissued this classical work and similar essays.
For further reading: E.M. Forster by Lionel Trilling (1943); The Novels of .M. Forster by J. McConley (1957); Down There on a Visit by Christopher Isherwood (1962); The Achievement of E.M. Foerster by J. Beer (1962); The Cave and the Mountain by Wilfred Stone (1966); E.M. Forster: a Life by B.N. Furbank (1977-78, 2 vols.); An E.M. Forster Dictinary by Alfredo Borello (1971); An E.M. Forster Glossary by Alfredo Borello (1972); The Bloomsbury Group by S.P. Rosenbaum (1975); A Bibliography of E.M. Forster by Brownlee Jean Kirkpatrick (1986); E.M. Forster, ed. by Harold Bloom (1987); A Passage to India by Judith Scherer Herz (1993); A Passage to India, ed. by Tony Davies and Nigel Wood (1994); The Prose and the Passion by Nigel Rapport (1994); Morgan: A Biography of E.M. Forster by Nicola Beauman (1994); E.M. Forster: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. by Jeremy Tambling (1995); The Modernist as Pragmatist by Brian May (1997); Queer Forster, ed. by Robert K. Martin and George Piggford (1997); Howards End, ed. by Paul B. Armstrong (1998)
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