Thomas Hardy's professional career was a triumph of self–help. Born the son of a village stonemason and a cook, he made himself the best–known English author of his day. He began with a course of self–education. Leaving school at sixteen, he taught himself Greek, and read Greek and Latin poetry between five and eight every morning, before walking three miles to work in an architect's office. His private life was less unusual. Like most people, Hardy had problems with sex, money, health, morale, marital and social relationships, ageing, and bereavement. Outwardly uneventful, his personal life was interesting chiefly as raw material for his writings. Other material came from his extensive and varied reading, not least in classical literature, which Paul Turner, himself a classicist, shows to have played a key part in Hardy's work as both novelist and poet. The profound influence upon Hardy, not only of Greek and Roman epic, Greek tragedy (and a late Greek novel), but also of Shakespeare, Milton and the Victorian poets, figures prominently here, as too does the literary value for him of his practical knowledge of music. Turner's strikingly original and penetrating account of Hardy's extraordinarily creative life and longevity offers a series of thirty–two chapters, each of which relates the biographical and literary background of a single work.