John Galsworthy
PEN arose in the drawing rooms of Bloomsbury in the cultural aftershock of Europe’s Great War. In 1921 Catherine Amy Dawson Scott and John Galsworthy started a club for “Poets, Playwrights, Essayists and Novelists” with Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells as founding members. Radclyffe Hall, D.H. Lawrence, Rebecca West and W. B. Yeats joined soon afterwards. The club hoped its gatherings might help European writers to transcend their political differences through a shared love of literature.
Catherine Amy Dawson Scott
A CENTURY OF PEN
PEN Canada Annual Report 20/21 1
