How to Make the Best of Life

by Arnold Bennett

“How to Make the Best of Life” is a 1923 self help book by English writer Arnold Bennett. It offers the reader simple, practical advice on how to lead a good life, looking at how one should deal with such aspects as business, love, children, citizenship, and much more. A timeless self-betterment manual that has helped improve people's lives for nearly a hundred years. Contents “Temperament and Habits”, “Establishing Good Three Aids”, “The Business of Education”, “Starting Life”, “Falling in Love”, “Marriage”, “The Continuation of Marriage”, “Children”, “Not for the Young”, and “Being Interested in the Community”. Enoch Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was an English writer. Although he is perhaps best remembered for his popular novels, Bennett also produced work in other areas including the theatre, propaganda, journalism, and film. Other notable works by this author “Helen with a High Hand” (1910), “The Card” (1911), and “Hilda Lessways” (1911). This classic work is being republished now in a new edition complete with an introductory essay on Arnold Bennett by F. J. Harvey Darton.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboration with other writers), and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.
Born into a modest but upwardly mobile family in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, Bennett was intended by his father, a solicitor, to follow him into the legal profession. Bennett worked for his father before moving to another law firm in London as a clerk at the age of 21. He became assistant editor and then editor of a women's magazine before becoming a full-time author in 1900. Always a devotee of French culture in general and French literature in particular, he moved to Paris in 1903; there the relaxed milieu helped him overcome his intense shyness, particularly with women. He spent ten years in France, marrying a Frenchwoman in 1907. In 1912 he moved back to England. He and his wife separated in 1921, and he spent the last years of his life with a new partner, an English actress. He died in 1931 of typhoid fever, having unwisely drunk tap-water in France.
Many of Bennett's novels and short stories are set in a fictionalised version of the Staffordshire Potteries, which he called The Five Towns. He strongly believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and he deplored literary cliques and élites. His books appealed to a wide public and sold in large numbers. For this reason, and for his adherence to realism, writers and supporters of the modernist school, notably Virginia Woolf, belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. During his lifetime his journalistic "self-help" books sold in substantial numbers, and he was also a playwright; he did less well in the theatre than with novels but achieved two considerable successes with Milestones (1912) and The Great Adventure (1913).
Studies by Margaret Drabble (1974), John Carey (1992), and others have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work. The finest of his novels, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923), are now widely recognised as major works.