Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was an English novelist and poet whose works depict the beauty, hardship, and tragic fate of rural life in his fictional Wessex. His major novels — Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Jude the Obscure — blend pastoral settings with unflinching social realism. Hardy abandoned fiction after the controversy over Jude the Obscure and devoted his later years to poetry.
