The Skin Game (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Tragi-Comedy

By John Galsworthy

This 1920 play by Galsworthy—made into a 1931 film by Alfred Hitchcock—features a collision between two families:  the "old-money" Hillcrists and the nouveau-riche Hornblowers.  As the patriarchs of the two families squabble over a piece of land, an innocent young woman will pay the price.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411440326

John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy was a Nobel-Prize (1932) winning English dramatist, novelist, and poet born to an upper-middle class family in Surrey, England. He attended Harrow and trained as a barrister at New College, Oxford. Although called to the bar in 1890, rather than practise law, Galsworthy travelled extensively and began to write. It was as a playwright Galsworthy had his first success. His plays—like his most famous work, the series of novels comprising The Forsyte Saga—dealt primarily with class and the social issues of the day, and he was especially harsh on the class from which he himself came.