Bennett was born in 1887, and not for nothing was he born at Hanley, one of the Five Towns of Staffordshire that he has made famous in his best stories--a somber, busy, smoky place bristling with factory chimneys and noted for its potteries. How susceptible he was to the spell of it, how it made him its own, and how vividly he remembers traits and idiosyncrasies of local character and all the trivial detail in the furnishing of its houses and the manners and customs of its Victorian home-life are evident from his books. He came to London with the acute commonsense, the mother wit, the shrewd business instinct and energy of the Hanley manufacturer as inevitably in his blood as if he had breathed them in with his native air, and he adapted himself to the manufacture of literature as industriously and straightforwardly as any of his equally but differently competent fellow-townsmen could give themselves to the manufacture of pottery. He worked with his imagination as they worked with their clay; and it was essential with him, as with them, that the goods he produced should be marketable. There is always a public for a good story of mystery and sensation so, in those days when he was feeling his way, he wrote “The Grand Babylon Hotel,” and did it so thoroughly, so efficiently that it was one of the cleverest and most original, no less than one of the most successful things of its kind. In the same year he published “Anna of the Five Towns,” which was less popular but remains among the best six of his finer realistic tales of his own people. He followed this with three or four able enough novels of lesser note; with a wholly admirable collection of short stories, “The Grim Smile of the Five Towns”; was busy with those astute, provocative pot-boiling pocket-philosophies, “Journalism for Women,” “How to Become an Author,” “How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day,” and the rest; writing dramatic criticisms; plays, such as “Cupid and Commonsense,” “What the Public Wants”; and, over the signature of “Jacob Tonson,” one of the most brilliant and entertaining of weekly literary causeries.