Edwin Pugh

Edwin William Pugh (1874 - 5 February 1930) was an English writer. He published 33 books, primarily novels and short story collections, and focused on working-class "cockney school" storylines.

The Modernist Journals Project finds that "Pugh's fiction largely goes unread today, and those critics who have read him generally accuse him of sentimentality and melodrama." He also wrote literary criticism praising the works of Charles Dickens.

Life
Pugh was born at 47, Foley Street, Marylebone, London, the second of four children of David Walter Pugh (1843-1887), a theatrical property maker and player with the Covent Garden orchestra. After positive reviews of his first two books, A Street in Suburbia (1895) (a collection of short stories, published when he was 21 years old) and The Man of Straw (1896), Pugh left his job as a clerk to write full-time. After a few years of good fortune, however, Pugh's working class output lost favor, and he struggled with poverty for the rest of his life. He died in London on 5 February 1930.