November 6, 1982

He first published his autobiography in 1938. Frank Swinnerton (August 12, 1884 to November 6, 1982). was an English novelist, literary critic and editor. He just kept on writing, tales with that British ruffle of coziness, long after writers he edited, such as Aldous Huxley, were beyond needing  his help.

According to his obituary in The New York Times:

Most of his books celebrated the literary life, love, human foibles and his neighbors outside the wooden gate of his home, Old Tokefield, a 16th-century stone cottage in Cranleigh, Surrey. In addition to writing novels, Mr. Swinnerton was a literary critic, essayist, editor and journalist. He was close friends with the novelists H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett.

A recent assessment of Frank Swinnerton contains these remarks:

For his own novels, he remained in his village concentrating on stories that featured “characters in a muddle”, from which he extricated them in the course of each novel. He felt there was too much showing off in the arts, and that writers would benefit by being less flashy and prone to intellectual pretension. For this reason he is sometimes linked with H G Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett, and there are indeed touches of Bennett and George Gissing in his prose style. Although he was highly regarded in his time, he was not a great writer; his novels feature solid, interesting, working-class characters who lead somewhat dull lives, but their stories are not without insight. If he were working now, it’s tempting to imagine that he would be writing for Coronation Street. Swinnerton’s most admired volume was non-fiction; The Georgian Literary Scene [1933] became a touchstone work and is still widely referenced, despite being out of print.

He couldn't remember how many books he had written, and I am not certain how many titles of his reference a feline, but we noticed The Cats and Rosemary (1948) and A Tigress in Prothero (1959.)