British · b. 1707
Henry Fielding was an English novelist and dramatist, a founder of the English novel, best known for the comic masterpiece Tom Jones.
Henry Fielding was a playwright, satirist, and magistrate as well as a novelist, and his wit, irony, and shrewd understanding of human nature inform all his fiction.
His comic masterpiece, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), follows its good-hearted but flawed hero through a sprawling, exuberant, and brilliantly plotted comic adventure, and is regarded as one of the first and finest English novels. His earlier Joseph Andrews and the satirical Shamela established his comic and parodic gifts.
Fielding is celebrated as a founder of the English novel and a master of comic narrative, whose generous, worldly humor still delights readers.
by Henry Fielding
Tom Jones, a foundling of unknown parentage raised by the good-natured Squire Allworthy, is in love with the beautiful Sophia Western. Expelled from the estate, he travels toward London through a comic series of adventures, misidentifications, and encounters with English society at every level. Fielding's masterpiece and the most important comic novel in English before Dickens.
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