Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The term "cliffhanger" is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's novel A Pair of Blue Eyes. In this novel Henry Knight, one of his protagonists, is left literally hanging off a cliff. The story, serialized in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873, became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.
21 books by Thomas Hardy
A Group of Noble Dames
A Laodicean
A Pair of Blue Eyes
Desperate Remedies
Far from the Madding Crowd
Jude the Obscure
Late Lyrics and Earlier : with Many Other Verses
Life's Little Ironies A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
The Hand of Ethelberta
The Mayor of Casterbridge
The Return of the Native
The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid
The Trumpet-Major
The Well-Beloved
The Woodlanders
Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses
Two on a Tower
Under the Greenwood Tree
Wessex Tales

