Long Fiction:
The Beautiful Years, 1921
Dandelion Days, 1922
The Dream of Fair Women, 1924
The Pathway, 1928 (the 4 previous volumes known collectively as The Flax of Dreams, 1936)
Tarka the Otter, 1927
The Star-Born, 1933
Salar the Salmon, 1935
The Phasian Bird, 1948
The Dark Lantern, 1951
Donkey Boy, 1952
Young Phillip Madison, 1953
How Dear Is Life, 1954
A Fox Under My Cloak, 1955
The Golden Virgin, 1957
Love and the Loveless, 1958
A Test to Destruction, 1960
The Innocent Moon, 1961
It Was the Nightingale, 1962
The Power of the Dead, 1963
The Phoenix Generation, 1965
A Solitary War, 1966
Lucifer Before Sunrise, 1967
The Gale of the World, 1969 (the 15 previous volumes known collectively as A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight)
The Scandaroon, 1972
Short Fiction:
The Old Stag, 1926
Tales of Moorland and Estuary, 1953
The Henry Williamson Animal Saga, 1960
Collected Nature Stories, 1970, 1995
Nonfiction:
The Story of a Norfolk Farm, 1941
Life in a Devon Village, 1945
Tales of a Devon Village, 1945
A Clear Water Stream, 1958
Spring Days in Devon, and Other Broadcasts, 1992
Pen and Plough: Further Broadcasts, 1993
Edited Texts:
Anthology of Modern Nature Writing, 1936
Richard Jefferies: Selections from His Work, 1937
Henry Williamson’s lonely childhood was spent in a Bedfordshire house that had belonged to his family for more than four centuries. During his formative years he read and admired the writings of Richard Jefferies, who thus provided the inspiration for his later work. When World War I began Williamson enlisted; he was then nineteen. He served throughout the war in Flanders, where some of the bitterest fighting occurred and casualties were appalling. He returned to civilian life with gray hair and shattered nerves in 1920. Completely unable to cope with the hectic pettiness of the life around him, he attempted to earn a living as a reporter for the Weekly Dispatch, but he was forced to give up the position. He then tried to eke out an existence on his pension, which provided the meager income of forty pounds a year; this was supplemented by small sums received for nature articles that he contributed weekly to the Daily Express. He slept in haystacks in the nearby countryside or under trees on the Thames embankment. He was depressed and morbid, and he contemplated suicide. He had almost reached the end of his tether when he decided to abandon his impossible urban existence. He walked to Devonshire and settled down in a cottage at Exmoor to complete his first novel. As time passed, he found it possible to earn a living with his pen, and he found contentment in his rural surroundings. His work was admired by such famous writers as Walter de la Mare, Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy, and T. E. Lawrence. His nature novel Tarka the Otter won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and brought him widespread recognition; it has remained a modern nature classic. Two of his later books, Salar the Salmon and The Phasian Bird, the story of a pheasant, are considered equally significant.
Although Williamson was a prolific and successful writer, much of his work has not been issued in the United States. Nevertheless, he is widely regarded as one of the most gifted of nature writers; his novels reveal the lives of wild creatures from their own viewpoints, as evoked by a mind of deep insight and understanding. His somber prose transmits, faithfully, the eternal struggle of living things to survive and with it a deep awareness of the transitory fragility of life.
In his later years, he returned to the themes of his first series of novels, known collectively as The Flax of Dreams, which concerns an idealistic young officer who seeks to understand the causes of war. In A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, a vast, autobiographical series of fifteen novels, he updates his themes into the 1950’s and reaches a happier conclusion. His accounts of rural life in Devon and Norfolk have also retained some of their popularity.