Centenary 1903-2003

	1903 - 2003
The year 2003 marked the one-hundredth anniversary of E. M. Forster's debut as a professional writer. In 1903 he went on his second trip to Italy and his first to Greece; back in London at the end of that year he published two pieces based on his Mediterranean experiences.
The first was a whimsical short historical essay titled "Macolnia Shops," which appeared in the second issue of The Independent Review (November, 1903), a new journal of culture and politics, edited by Cambridge friends.
The second publication, and his first published short story, was "Albergo Empedocle," which came out in the venerable magazine Temple Bar in December 1903.
This particular sequence takes on significance in view of the subsequent publishing history of the two pieces and the overall trajectory of Forster's career as a writer. "Macolnia Shops" was the first of many things Forster would publish in The Independent Review throughout the lifetime of the journal (1903-1907). The essay achieved a permanent place when Forster included it in his collection of essays, Abinger Harvest (1936), which has never gone out of print.
The story "Albergo Empedocle," on the other hand, was never printed again during Forster's lifetime, and he never again published anything in Temple Bar. In fact, he gave up publishing (and for the most part even writing) fiction by the late 1920s. From then on he concentrated on reviews, essays, biography, and other non-fiction forms, and took up the entirely new activity of broadcasting for the BBC.