(Robert) Howard Spring

Novelist, born in Cardiff, S Wales, UK. He started as an errand boy, became a newspaper reporter and literary critic, and established himself as a writer with his best-selling Oh Absalom (1938), renamed My Son, My Son. Other novels include Fame is the Spur (1940), Dunkerleys (1946), These Lovers Fled Away (1955), and Time and the Hour (1957), as well as three autobiographical works.

Howard Spring (February 10, 1889 - May 3, 1965) was a Welsh author.

Howard Spring was born in 1889 at Cardiff in Wales.

Howard Spring was born in Cardiff on 10 February 1889, the son of a poor jobbing gardener. Spring was forced to leave school at the age of twelve when his father died to start work as an errand boy. Spring was keen to train as a reporter, and he spent his leisure time learning shorthand and taking evening classes at the local university, where he studied English, French, Latin, mathematics and history.

In 1911 he joined the Yorkshire Observer in Bradford before moving in 1915 to the Manchester Guardian, but was there only a few months until he was called up for the Army Service Corps as a shorthand typist. Scott, the editor, apparently highly regarded Spring's reporting skills; he wrote of Spring that: "Nobody does a better 'descriptive' or a better condensation of a difficult address". At the same time, Spring was developing his ambitions as a writer;

In 1939 Spring moved to Mylor in Cornwall (his wife Marion's father had a house at St Mawes) to become a full-time writer. During the war years Spring wrote two other novels, Hard Facts (1944) and Dunkerley's (1946).

In 1947 Spring and his wife moved to Falmouth - The White Cottage in Fenwick Road - and in the post-war period, he published, There is No Armour (1948), The Houses in Between (1951), A Sunset Touch (1953), These Lovers Fled Away (1955), Time and the Hour (1957), All Day Long (1959) and I Met a Lady (1961). Spring also produced three volumes of autobiography: Heaven Lies About Us, A Fragment of Infancy (1939);

During this period Spring served eight years as President of the prestigious Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society as well as being a Director of the Falmouth School of Art and President of the Cornish Drama League.

Spring was a popular and successful writer, who combined a wide understanding of human character with technical skill as a novelist. each morning he would shut himself in his room and write one thousand words, steadily building up to novels of around one hundred and fifty thousand words. Howard Spring died of a stroke.

In 1967, his wife Marion Howard Spring wrote an affectionate story of their life together called 'Howard' which was published by Collins.