War novel prefaced the (American) first edition of 1941, Powys comments "the beginning of the fifteenth century […] saw the beginning of one of the most momentous and startling epochs of "transition" that the world has known". This was written in May 1940, and "[t]here can be no doubt" that readers of the novel would have "registered the connection between the actions of the book and the events of their own world". "Fair Stood the Wind for France" is a 1944 novel by H. E. Bates, which is concerned with a pilot of a Wellington bomber, who badly injures his arm when
H. E. Bates story. At this time he was working briefly for the local newspaper in Wellingborough, a job which he hated, and then later at a local shoe-making warehouse, where he had time to write; in fact the whole of this first novel was written there. This was sent to, and rejected by, eight or nine publishers until Jonathan Cape accepted it on the advice of its highly respected Reader, Edward Garnett. Bates was then twenty years old. More novels, collections of short stories, essays, and articles followed, but did not pay well. During World War II, he was commissioned into the